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> Alice's router is dumb. It sees traffic on port 1234, checks its NAT table, and sees that data is supposed to go to Alice.

While in principle that is possible, in practice almost all home routers are based on Linux, and Linux netfilter NAT implementation distinguish connections based on port and IP, not just port, so this would not work.




I think you would enjoy this article from Tailscale: https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/

The poke a hole to outside world to a random server, log the port allocated to you by your router and have someone else use this to connect to you is the basis of STUN protocol.


Home routers often greatly simplify the interface.

BT, one of the largest ISP's in the UK, only allow the configuration of destination IP and external/internal ports[0].

I've never expected my NAT to do anything other than map ports. I can see why the ability to map source IPs to different ports would be useful but relying on that as a security feature feels like a foot-gun. I wouldn't feel comfortable exposing an application that doesn't have some form of authentication and/or blacklisting.

[0] https://portforward.com/bt/home-hub-6/Port%20Forwarding.jpg




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