Cloud NAT

Overview

This plugin covers specific NAT use-cases that come mostly from the container networking world. On the contrary of the NAT concepts used for e.g. a home gateway, there is no notion of ‘outside’ and ‘inside’. We handle Virtual (or Real) IPs and translations of the packets destined to them

Terminology & Usage

Setting up the NAT will consist in the creation of a translation that has several backends. A translation is 3-tuple containing : a fully qualified IP address a port and a protocol. All packets destined to it (ip, port) will then choose one of the backends, and follow its rewrite rules.

A backend consists of four rewrites components (source & destination address, source & destination port) that shall be applied to packets on the way in, and reverted on the way back.

Backends are equally load-balanced with a flow hash. The choice of a backend for a flow will trigger the creation of a NAT session, that will store the packet rewrite to do and the one to undo until the flow is reset or a timeout is reached

A session is a fully resolved 9-tuple of src_ip, src_port, dest_ip, dest_port, proto to match incoming packets, and their new attributes new_src_ip, new_src_port, new_dest_ip, new_dest_port. It allows for backend stickiness and a fast-path for established connections.

These sessions expire after 30s for regular sessions and 1h for established TCP connections. These can be changed in vpp’s configuration file

cnat {
    session-max-age 60
    tcp-max-age 3600
}

Traffic is matched by inserting FIB entries, that are represented by a client. These maintain a refcount of the number of sessions and/or translations depending on them and be cleaned up when all have gone.

Translating Addresses

In this example, all packets destined to 30.0.0.2:80 will be rewritten so that their destination IP is 20.0.0.1 and destination port 8080. Here 30.0.0.2 has to be a virtual IP, it cannot be assigned to an interface

cnat translation add proto TCP vip 30.0.0.2 80 to ->20.0.0.1 8080

If 30.0.0.2 is the address of an interface, we can use the following to do the same translation, and additionally change the source. address with 1.2.3.4

cnat translation add proto TCP real 30.0.0.2 80 to 1.2.3.4->20.0.0.1 8080

To show existing translations and sessions you can use

cnat show session verbose
cant show translation

SourceNATing outgoing traffic

A independent part of the plugin allows changing the source address of outgoing traffic on a per-interface basis.

In the following example, all traffic coming from tap0 and NOT going to 20.0.0.0/24 will be source NAT-ed with 30.0.0.1. On the way back the translation will be undone.

NB: 30.0.0.1 should be and address known to the FIB (e.g. the address assigned to an interface)

cnat snat with 30.0.0.1
cnat snat exclude 20.0.0.0/24
set interface feature tap0 cnat-snat-ip4 arc ip4-unicast

Other parameters

In vpp’s startup file, you can also configure the bihash sizes for

the translation bihash (proto, port) -> translation
the session bihash src_ip, src_port, dest_ip, dest_port, proto -> new_src_ip, new_src_port, new_dest_ip, new_dest_port
the snat bihash for searching snat exclude prefixes

cnat {
    translation-db-memory 64K
    translation-db-buckets 1024
    session-db-memory 1M
    session-db-buckets 1024
    snat-db-memory 64M
    snat-db-buckets 1024
}

Extending the NAT

This plugin is built to be extensible. For now two NAT types are defined, cnat_node_vip.c and cnat_node_snat.c. They both inherit from cnat_node.h which provides :

Session lookup : rv will be set to 0 if a session was found
Translation primitives cnat_translation_ip4 based on sessions
A session creation primitive cnat_session_create

Creating a session will also create a reverse session (for matching return traffic), and call a NAT node back that will perform the translation.

Known limitations

This plugin is still under development, it lacks the following features : * Load balancing doesn’t support parametric probabilities * VRFs aren’t supported. All rules apply to fib table 0 only * Programmatic session handling (deletion, lifetime updates) aren’t supported * ICMP is not yet supported * Traffic matching is only done based on (proto, dst_addr, dst_port) source matching isn’t supported * Statistics & session tracking are still rudimentary.