Port Forwarding

Question 1

Any traffic arriving on a specific TCP or UDP port will be forwarded to a defined internal host and port. Useful tool even on home routers, but also used in SOHO and corporate environments. Port Forwarding allows for the forwarding of any port

Answer 1

What is Port Forwarding?

Question 2

1 - WebServer - forward ports 80(HTTP) and 443(HTTPS) to the server so it will be sent any web traffic
2 - Mail Server - ie: MS Exchange it will need to be forwarded traffic coming inbound on port 25 (SMTP)
3 - IP Camera: use a random port number above 1024 such as 9000 or 15000 and forward that to the camera on internal port 80. That way we aren’t using up the web port (80) and we are also adding just a bit of security by using a non-standard port

Answer 2

When to use Port Forwarding?

Question 3

Used to access servers or systems that are behind a firewall
Traffic from the internet to a port on your router can be forwarded to a specific IP address and the port number on the LAN

Answer 3

How is Port Forwarding used?

Question 4

For good security practice. It is good to change the incoming forwarded port to a non-standard port (ie: IP camera port 9000 instead of port 80)
We don’t want to open up port 80 outside of our secured network
For additional security, we can restrict the allowed source networks

Answer 4

Why is Port Forwarding used?