Port 3498: DASHPAS — The Port That Got Claimed and Vanished

What Port 3498 Is

Port 3498 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151), the middle tier of the port number system. Ports in this range are supposed to be claimed by specific applications through IANA — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — so that different software doesn't accidentally step on each other's toes.

In May 2002, someone registered port 3498 under the name DASHPAS user port. The contact listed was Albrecht Mayer. Both TCP and UDP were claimed.

That's the entire public record.

No RFC describes DASHPAS. No open-source project implements it. No documentation explains what it does, what problem it solved, or what "DASHPAS" even stands for. Whatever software this port was reserved for either never shipped, never spread beyond a private network, or quietly died sometime in the early 2000s.

What the Registered Range Means

The 1024–49151 range was designed for applications that need a stable, predictable port. If you're building software that listens on the network and want other software to be able to find you reliably, you apply to IANA and get a number assigned. The idea is that ssh always lives at 22, https always lives at 443, and your application always lives at whatever number IANA gave you.

The system works well for protocols that survive — HTTP, DNS, SMTP. It works less well when registrations outlive the software they were meant for. IANA doesn't reclaim ports from abandoned projects. Once you have a number, you have it, even if the software is gone.¹

Port 3498 is one of many registered ports that exist as relics: a name, a date, and a silence where documentation should be.

What Might Actually Be Using Port 3498

In practice, unoccupied registered ports often get squatted by applications that never bothered with IANA registration. If you see traffic on port 3498 on your network, it's almost certainly not DASHPAS — it's whatever local application decided this was a convenient number.

Common culprits for unexpected port activity:

• Custom internal applications
• Gaming clients
• Peer-to-peer software
• Remote administration tools
• Development servers that picked an arbitrary port

How to Check What's Listening

On Linux or macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 3498
ss -tlnp | grep 3498

# Or with lsof
lsof -i :3498

On Windows:

# Show listening process
netstat -ano | findstr :3498

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

If something is listening and you don't recognize it, that's worth investigating — not because port 3498 has any particular security reputation, but because unexpected listeners are always worth understanding.

Why Ghost Registrations Matter

The registered port range has a capacity problem. With roughly 48,000 slots and decades of accumulation, a meaningful number of registered ports are held by software that no longer exists. IANA can't easily reclaim them because it's difficult to prove abandonment, and the consequences of reassigning an active port could break real systems somewhere.

Port 3498 is a small example of a larger truth about the Internet's infrastructure: it carries the weight of its entire history. Old decisions, dead projects, and abandoned registrations don't disappear — they just get quieter.