I’ve spent some time searching this question, but I have yet to find a satisfying answer. The majority of answers that I have seen state something along the lines of the following:
- “It’s just good security practice.”
- “You need it if you are running a server.”
- “You need it if you don’t trust the other devices on the network.”
- “You need it if you are not behind a NAT.”
- “You need it if you don’t trust the software running on your computer.”
The only answer that makes any sense to me is #5. #1 leaves a lot to be desired, as it advocates for doing something without thinking about why you’re doing it – it is essentially a non-answer. #2 is strange – why does it matter? If one is hosting a webserver on port 80, for example, they are going to poke a hole in their router’s NAT at port 80 to open that server’s port to the public. What difference does it make to then have another firewall that needs to be port forwarded? #3 is a strange one – what sort of malicious behaviour could even be done to a device with no firewall? If you have no applications listening on any port, then there’s nothing to access. #4 feels like an extension of #3 – only, in this case, it is most likely a larger group that the device is exposed to. #5 is the only one that makes some sense; if you install a program that you do not trust (you don’t know how it works), you don’t want it to be able to readily communicate with the outside world unless you explicitly grant it permission to do so. Such an unknown program could be the door to get into your device, or a spy on your device’s actions.
If anything, a firewall only seems to provide extra precautions against mistakes made by the user, rather than actively preventing bad actors from getting in. People seem to treat it as if it’s acting like the front door to a house, but this analogy doesn’t make much sense to me – without a house (a service listening on a port), what good is a door?
No offense to you but there is a massive risk exposing services to the internet. I’ll let someone else more qualified explain.
Of course there is risk in exposing a service to the internet; a service open to the internet has a far greater potential attack surface, so there is a greater chance that an existing vulnerability in the exposed service gets exploited. But that is not an argument against the practice of port forwarding – you just need to make sure that you take adequate precautions to mitigate risk. You do realize that, to be able to access a service from the internet, you need to expose it to the internet, right?
The problem is when you expose your server to the entire internet. It only takes a few minutes for the bots to find you.
Honestly you should use a mesh VPN instead.
I mean, sure, but the existence of bots doesn’t immediately guarantee that a given service will be compromised; simply take precautions to ensure that the exposed services are secure, that the rest of the network, and the device itself are adequately protected, etc.
In order to solve what problem, specifically?