Routing concepts Advanced Static Routing
Network Address Translation (NAT)
Network address translation (NAT) is a method of changing the address from which traffic appears to originate. This
practice is used to hide the IP address on a company’s internal networks, and helps prevent malicious attacks that use
those specific addresses.
This is accomplished by the router connected to that local network changing all the IP addresses to its externally
connected IP address before sending the traffic out to the other networks, such as the Internet. Incoming traffic uses
the established sessions to determine which traffic goes to which internal IP address. This also has the benefit of
requiring only the router to be very secure against external attacks, instead of the whole internal network as would be
the case without NAT. Securing one computer is much cheaper and easier to maintain.
1. Configuring NAT on your FortiGate unit includes the following steps.
2. Configure your internal network. For example use the 10.11.101.0 subnet.
3. Connect your internal subnet to an interface on your FortiGate unit. For example use port1.
4. Connect your external connection, for example an ISP gateway of 172.20.120.2, to another interface on
your Fortigate unit, for example port2.
Configure security policies to allow traffic between port1 and port2 on your FortiGate unit, ensuring that the NAT
feature is enabled.
The above steps show that traffic from your internal network will originate on the 10.11.101.0 subnet and pass on to
the 172.20.120.0 network. The FortiGate unit moves the traffic to the proper subnet. In doing that, the traffic appears
to originate from the FortiGate unit interface on that subnet — it does not appear to originate from where it actually
came from.
NAT “hides” the internal network from the external network. This provides security through obscurity. If a hacker tries to
directly access your network, they will find the Fortigate unit, but will not know about your internal network. The hacker
would have to get past the security-hardened FortiGate unit to gain access to your internal network. NAT will not
prevent hacking attempts that piggy back on valid connections between the internal network and the outside world.
However other UTM security measures can deal with these attempts.
Another security aspect of NAT is that many programs and services have problems with NAT. Consider if someone on
the Internet tries to initiate a chat with someone on the internal network. The outsider only can access the FortiGate
unit’s external interface unless the security policy allows the traffic through to the internal network. If allowed in, the
proper internal user would respond to the chat. However if its not allowed, the request to chat will be refused or time-
out. This is accomplished in the security policy by allowing or denying different protocols.
Access Control List (ACL)
An access control list (ACL) is a table of addresses that have permission to send and receive data over a router’s
interface or interfaces. The router maintains an ACL, and when traffic comes in on a particular interface it is buffered,
while the router looks up in the ACL if that traffic is allowed over that port or not. If it is allowed on that incoming
interface, then the next step is to check the ACL for the destination interface. If the traffic passes that check as well the
buffered traffic is delivered to its accentuation. If either of those steps fail the ACL check, the traffic is dropped and an
error message may be sent to the sender. The ACL ensures that traffic follows expected paths, and any unexpected
traffic is not delivered. This stops many network attacks. However, to be effective the ACL must be kept up to date —
when employees or computers are removed from the internal network their IP addresses must also be removed from
the ACL. For more information on the ACL, see the router chapter of the FortiGate CLI Reference.
Blackhole Route
A blackhole route is a route that drops all traffic sent to it. It is very much like /dev/null in Linux programming.
Advanced Routing for FortiOS 5.2
Fortinet Technologies Inc.
18