Explicit Mechanisms for Controlling NAT/Firewall Systems Dynamically

Overview

NAT/Firewall systems are very widely utilized in today's network environments, such as intranets and the Internet. Together with many security enhancements, however, the use of NATs/Firewalls has raised a number of new issues and problems. Most of them related to the complex NAT/Firewall traversal problem, where applications and services are blocked to connect to each other by NATs/Firewalls. This paper describes existing and most commonly used explicit mechanisms for controlling NAT/Firewall systems dynamically. This paper describes existing and most commonly used explicit mechanisms for controlling NAT/Firewall systems dynamically. The focus of this paper, in addition to the overview of the mechanisms, is to compare the mechanisms with each other and to give some concluding remarks.