What is it?
Winroute Pro’s main function is a combined software router and firewall. It has other features too, which I will mention in passing, but they would only be of real interest to corporate users so I will pass over them here. Most routers are hardware based, such as the Cisco products, but this just needs a Windows PC to run on and does the routing in software. Here is my highly unofficial definition of what a router does (I’d fail my MCSE if I gave this answer…). A router acts as a gateway between two networks, in this case your LAN and the internet. You simply send data to the gateway (an IP address) from either network and it sends it to the correct location on another network. It differs from a proxy in that no ports have to be set up in normal circumstances, as port information is routed too. Data is swapped between machines by a process called NAT – Network Address Translation.NAT - Network Address Translation
This is the core Winroute’s security feature. NAT is an Internet 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 provide NAT.
It can be implemented in many ways, but essentially it creates a private address space for internal networks that is “translated” by WinRoute so that communications can pass to and from public networks without revealing information about sensitive internal systems. Without knowledge of the private address space on the internal interface of a WinRoute firewall, it is practically impossible to directly attack a system on the NAT-ed internal network