NAT64
Understand that NAT64 allows you to communicate between an IPv6-only network and an
IPv4 network
| Where Can I Use This? | What Do I Need? |
|---|
- NGFW (Managed by PAN-OS or Panorama)
| |
NAT64 provides a way to transition to IPv6 while you
still need to communicate with IPv4 networks. When you need to communicate
from an IPv6-only network to an IPv4 network, you use NAT64 to translate
source and destination addresses from IPv6 to IPv4 and vice versa.
NAT64 allows IPv6 clients to access IPv4 servers and allows IPv4
clients to access IPv6 servers. You should understand
NAT before
configuring NAT64.
You can configure two types of NAT64 translation on a Palo Alto Networks®
firewall; each one is doing a bidirectional translation between the two IP address
families:
A single IPv4 address can be used for NAT44 and NAT64; you don’t reserve a pool of IPv4
addresses for NAT64 only.
NAT64 operates on Layer 3 interfaces, subinterfaces, and tunnel interfaces. To use NAT64
on a Palo Alto Networks firewall for IPv6-initiated communication, you must have a
third-party
DNS64 Server or a solution in place to separate the
DNS query function from the NAT function. The DNS64 server translates between your IPv6
host and an IPv4 DNS server by encoding the IPv4 address it receives from a public DNS
server into an IPv6 address for the IPv6 host.
Palo Alto Networks supports the following NAT64 features:
- Persistent NAT for DIPP
- Hairpinning (NAT U-Turn); additionally, NAT64 prevents hairpinning loop attacks by
dropping all incoming IPv6 packets that have a source prefix of 64::/n.
- Translation of TCP/UDP/ICMP packets per RFC
6146 and the firewall makes a best effort to translate other protocols
that don’t use an application-level gateway (ALG). For example, the firewall can
translate a GRE packet. This translation has the same limitation as NAT44: if you
don’t have an ALG for a protocol that can use a separate control and data channel,
the firewall might not understand the return traffic flow.
- Translation between IPv4 and IPv6 of the ICMP length attribute of the original
datagram field, per RFC 4884.
