NAT Traversal and IPv6

Question

I'm interested in learning about the benefits of NAT and NAT bypass mechanisms after expanding and using IPv6. We have so many NAT bypass mechanisms (including proprietary ones) that are primarily for IPv4 devices / clients that are behind some residential or corporate NATs. Given that NAT arose due to the lack of available IPv4 addresses, can it become redundant after IPv6 is widely adopted in the coming years, since IPv6 has enough addresses?

Of course, I understand that adoption of IPv6 will not happen overnight, and this is a gradual and painful process. And during this time, the devices will have to support some kind of double stack (IPv4 and IPv6), or some network object will translate between them. I believe that firewalls will continue to exist to protect end users and provide some security even in the IPv6 world.

What is the attitude of the IETF towards the NAT issue regarding standardization? given that they ignored NAT all this, while this led to a protocol violation.

Hope someone can shed some light on this.

Answer 1

With IPv6, it would still be prudent to avoid using IP addresses as host identifiers. Suggestions for representing standardized network prefix prefixes, for example. ID.mrw-nat66 does not seem to be too far from publication. More importantly, however, that firewalls won't go away soon, cf ID.ietf-v6ops-cpe-simple-security . Although you may not need to worry about prefixing or address translation breaking your applications, you can expect the ubiquitous firewalls to continue to interfere with application protocols and require that you follow the same basic workarounds that IPv4 entails. / NAT to maintain state of recording in middle fields on your application paths.