PORT44 records

TCP & UDP Port Reference

Reference records for common TCP and UDP ports: what each port is for, which transport it uses, whether traffic is encrypted, how to check it and what to consider before opening it.

Ports are 16-bit numbers (0–65535) that let one IP address host many services at once. A TCP or UDP packet carries a destination port so the receiving system knows which program should handle it. IANA maintains the registry that maps well-known numbers to services; the records below cover the ports that people most often need to look up, check or open.

Port ranges. 0–1023 are system or well-known ports, 1024–49151 are registered ports and 49152–65535 are dynamic or ephemeral ports used for the client side of connections. See ephemeral ports and well-known port ranges.

Look up any port. For numbers not listed here, the Port Lookup tool searches the full IANA registry in your browser.

Web & HTTP

Ports that carry HTTP and HTTPS traffic for browsers, APIs, proxies and development servers.

Remote access & administration

Shell, desktop and management protocols. Every port in this group deserves a firewall rule.

Email

Submission, relay and retrieval ports for SMTP, IMAP and POP3, plain and encrypted.

DNS, DHCP & infrastructure

The ports a network needs before anything else works: name resolution, address assignment, time, directory, logging.

File sharing & transfer

SMB, NetBIOS, FTP and related transfer protocols.

Databases & caches

Default listening ports for common database and cache servers. None of these should face the public internet.

VPN & tunnelling

Ports used by VPN protocols to establish tunnels.

Applications & games

Well-known ports for specific applications, game servers and media.

Checking whether a port is open

On Windows, netstat -ano | findstr :443 shows whether anything is listening on or connected to port 443, and the PID column identifies the process. PowerShell's Test-NetConnection host -Port 443 tests whether a remote host accepts connections. See the netstat and Test-NetConnection records.

Open port does not mean compromised

A listening port means a program has asked the operating system to accept connections there. Whether that is a problem depends on which program it is, whether it should be reachable from the network it is exposed to, and whether it is patched. Records in this reference describe the normal owner of each port and how to verify it.