Port 1982: Estamp — The Timestamp That Never Ticked

Port 1982 is registered with IANA. It has a name — estamp, short for Evidentiary Timestamp — and an assignee: Todd Glassey. What it doesn't have is an RFC, a deployed protocol, or any meaningful presence in the real world.

It's a reservation that never became a building.

What Estamp Was Supposed to Be

The idea behind evidentiary timestamping is legitimate. A trusted timestamp proves that a piece of data existed at a specific moment in time — useful in legal disputes, intellectual property claims, digital forensics, and contract law. If you can cryptographically prove a document existed before a certain date, you have evidence.

Todd Glassey was involved in early IETF discussions around geospatial keying and evidentiary digital testimony.¹ The port registration was a stake in the ground — a claim that a protocol would arrive to use it.

It didn't arrive. Not in a standardized form, not on port 1982.

The timestamping problem was solved differently. RFC 3161, the Time-Stamp Protocol (TSP), became the actual standard — it uses HTTP and HTTPS rather than a dedicated port, and it's what modern certificate authorities and timestamping services actually deploy today.²

Port 1982 sits in the registry, officially assigned, practically unused.

The Registered Port Range

Port 1982 falls in the registered ports range: 1024–49151.³

These ports were originally called "user ports" or "registered ports" to distinguish them from the well-known ports (0–1023), which require root/administrator privileges to bind on most systems. Registered ports can be used by any application — no special privileges required.

IANA maintains a registry of assignments for this range. Applications or individuals can apply for a port number to be associated with their service. Getting assigned is relatively straightforward. Building something that actually uses it is harder.

The result: a registry that contains many names attached to services that exist in varying degrees of reality, from widely deployed (like many ports in the 1024–5000 range) to almost entirely theoretical.

Port 1982 is on the theoretical end.

What's Actually Likely on Port 1982

Almost certainly not estamp.

If you see port 1982 active on a machine, it's almost certainly a custom internal application, a developer server, a game, or a piece of software that picked the number arbitrarily. Developers often choose ports in this range precisely because they're unoccupied in practice — even if the IANA registry says otherwise.

How to Check What's Listening

Linux / macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 1982
ss -tlnp | grep 1982

# Or with lsof:
lsof -i :1982

Windows:

# Show listening ports and associated processes
netstat -ano | findstr :1982

# Then look up the PID:
tasklist | findstr <PID>

If nothing appears, nothing is listening. Port 1982 is quiet — as it usually is.