What Port 3510 Is
Port 3510 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). These ports aren't reserved for system services the way well-known ports (0–1023) are, but they're not random either — IANA maintains a registry of claimed assignments to prevent collisions between software vendors and developers.
Port 3510 has one: registered in May 2002, assigned the service name "xss-port" by a Joe Purcell. Both TCP and UDP are listed.1
That's where the trail ends.
The Ghost Registration
There is no RFC for xss-port. No documentation. No known software that uses it. Whatever Joe Purcell was building or planning in 2002 left no trace beyond a line in the IANA registry.
The name is the interesting part. By 2002, "XSS" was already established shorthand for cross-site scripting — a web attack technique where malicious scripts are injected into trusted pages. Why a port would be named after an attack vector, or whether this "XSS" meant something else entirely (an internal product? an acronym from a company long dissolved?), is unknown.
The Internet is full of these ghost registrations: ports claimed during some project's planning phase, the project abandoned or shipped on a different port, and the IANA entry left behind like a forwarding address for a tenant who never moved in.
What's Actually on Port 3510
Almost certainly nothing, unless something is specifically configured to use it. Port scanners that probe port 3510 typically find it closed or filtered on most systems.
If you're seeing activity on port 3510, it's worth investigating — unassigned or dormant ports occasionally get repurposed by malware or used by applications that didn't bother to register a port properly.
How to Check What's Listening
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
If something is listening, lsof or netstat will show you the process ID. From there, look up the process name to identify the software.
Why Unassigned Ports Matter
The registered port range exists to create a voluntary coordination layer. No software is forced to register its ports with IANA, and no software is prevented from using an unregistered port. But registration prevents two popular applications from accidentally claiming the same port — or at least, it's supposed to.
When a port has a registration like port 3510's — a name with no corresponding software, documentation, or community awareness — it occupies a kind of limbo. Technically assigned. Practically empty. Not safe to assume no one will ever use it, not safe to assume anything is there.
Most of the registered range looks like this. The ports with rich stories (22, 80, 443, 25) are the exceptions. The rest are a mix of active services, forgotten claims, and the occasional accidental name that aged badly.
Port 3510 is the third kind.
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