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Title: ISPs More Likely To Throttle Netizens Who Connect Through Carrier-
Grade NAT: Cloudflare

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/11/04/1610...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Before the potential of the internet was
appreciated around the world, nations that understood its importance managed
to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses, actions that today mean many
users in the rest of the world are more likely to find their connections
throttled or blocked. So says Cloudflare, which last week published research
that recalls how once the world started to run out of IPv4 addresses,
engineers devised network address translation (NAT) so that multiple devices
can share a single IPv4 address. NAT can handle tens of thousands of devices,
but carriers typically operate many more. Internetworking wonks therefore
developed Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT), which can handle over 100 devices per
IPv4 address and scale to serve millions of users. That's useful for carriers
everywhere, but especially valuable for carriers in those countries that
missed out on big allocations of IPv4 because their small pool of available
number resources means they must employ CGNAT to handle more users and
devices. Cloudflare's research suggests carriers in Africa and Asia use CGNAT
more than those on other continents. Cloudflare worried that could be bad for
individual netizens. "CGNATs also create significant operational fallout
stemming from the fact that hundreds or even thousands of clients can appear
to originate from a single IP address," wrote Cloudflare researchers Vasilis
Giotsas and Marwan Fayed. "This means an IP-based security system may
inadvertently block or throttle large groups of users as a result of a single
user behind the CGNAT engaging in malicious activity. Blocking the shared IP
therefore penalizes many innocent users along with the abuser."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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