I’ve got some questions about gaming devices…
I can get multiple public IP addresses for my devices frome the ISP, so basically as the title said, in privacy and security perspective, I can separate my main network and gaming devices. But what I don’t know much about is how dangerous to let devices get internet access with public IP addresses.
Here’s my gaming devices:
Nintendo Switch, with Nintendo Switch Online
Gaming PC, with Windows/Bazzite Dual Boot, Windows for Online/Anti-cheat games, and Bazzite for the 3As, single player, and some online games. Assumed most of the security settings are in default.
I’m sorry but I’m going to give you a stackoverflow-esque answer:
why the fuck would you assign separate public IPs to your gaming devices and expose them to the public internet? If your goal is privacy and security, an actual way to achieve that is VLANs and firewalls (see: OPNsense) and putting the gaming devices in a DMZ VLAN (with appropriate NAT and outbound port rules so they don’t complain when you try and play multiplayer games)
I suspect you mean allowing the devices to access the public internet. But “exposing to the internet” generally means opening up ports to allow someone from the internet access to said devices. Opening ports on your router is something you should only do if you fully understand the risks (which are not inconsiderable) and have a good grasp on networking & security.
That said…
These days, the main reason to not let the gaming server get your actual public IP is if you’re playing on some private-ish servers for a specific game to try and prevent a DDoS from a random. With bigger companies’ servers, it’s less of a worry.
What I can think about is they can get max network performance, like Nintendo Switch (NS) NAT Type, they don’t need to do one more NAT. But the security wise is fully depends on OS configuration like firewall, the PC is able to do that but NS as a gaming console, it doesn’t have any configuration about that, but also it is a game console so it will only be able to access Nintendo’s services.
You can still have a firewall (e.g. pfSense, OPNsense) without NAT, whether the device is assigned a public or private IP address has nothing to do with security.
But if you don’t know how to secure devices with public IP addresses, you really have no business obtaining multiple public IP addresses from your ISP.
And you really should not just expose your consoles to the internet unfiltered and rely on the “OS configuration” to secure it. It sounds like you should just configure your router properly so the NAT doesn’t pose an issue instead.