NAT - Network Address Translation
Network Address Translation, or NAT, is one of WinRoute’s most powerful security features. NAT is an Internet draft standard protocol for hiding private network addresses behind a single address or multiple addresses. A version of NAT called IP Masquerading has been popular for many years with the Linux community and WinRoute is one of few products for the Windows platform to actually provide entry-level NAT functionality. NAT works by translating the source information of each packet leaving the NAT'd interface. When incoming traffic arrives at the NAT'd interface, its destination information is compared to the NAT table providing the functionality of stateful packet inspection. If there is no entry in the table the packet is rejected. Otherwise, it is retranslated to the proper destination information and routed back to the client.