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NAT64 Overview

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NAT64

IPv4-Embedded IPv6 Address

NAT64 Overview

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:

The firewall supports stateful NAT64 for IPv6-Initiated Communication, which maps multiple IPv6 addresses to one IPv4 address, thus preserving IPv4 addresses. (It does not support stateless NAT64, which maps one IPv6 address to one IPv4 address and therefore does not preserve IPv4 addresses.) Configure NAT64 for IPv6-Initiated Communication.

The firewall supports IPv4-initiated communication with a static binding that maps an IPv4 address and port number to an IPv6 address. Configure NAT64 for IPv4-Initiated Communication. It also supports port rewrite, which preserves even more IPv4 addresses by translating an IPv4 address and port number to an IPv6 address with multiple port numbers. Configure NAT64 for IPv4-Initiated Communication with Port Translation.

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:

(PAN-OS 10.1.6 and later 10.1 releases) Beginning with PAN-OS 10.1.6, persistent NAT for DIPP is available on VM-Series firewalls and single-dataplane firewalls. Beginning with PAN-OS 10.1.7, it is available on all firewalls.

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.

NAT64

IPv4-Embedded IPv6 Address

Next-Generation Firewall Docs

NAT64 Overview

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NAT64 Overview

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