Port 2108 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). Registered ports are claimed through IANA — the organization that keeps the master list of what protocol belongs where. Unlike the well-known ports below 1024 (HTTP, SSH, DNS), registered ports don't require elevated privileges to open, and there's no enforcement mechanism ensuring a service actually uses the port it registered.
Port 2108 has two IANA entries. Both are effectively dead.
What IANA Says Runs Here
rkinit — Kerberos v4 Remote Initialization
In 1989, Emanuel Jay Berkenbilt at MIT Project Athena wrote a tool called rkinit. The problem it solved was real: Kerberos tickets didn't travel between machines on their own. If you were logged into machine A and needed a ticket on machine B, you had to SSH to B and run kinit — which meant your password traveled over the wire. That was the whole thing Kerberos was trying to prevent.
rkinit fixed this. You'd run it from your local machine, and it would establish a ticket on the remote host without your credentials ever leaving the client. Port 2108 was registered for this protocol.
Kerberos v4 was retired long ago. Modern Kerberos (v5) handles ticket forwarding natively. rkinit is gone.1
comcam — Comcam
The second registration is "comcam" — a camera communication protocol. Very little public documentation exists about what Comcam was or who built it. It appears in IANA's registry alongside rkinit, sharing port 2108 for both TCP and UDP, and largely disappears from the historical record after that.2
What's Actually Listening on Port 2108 Today
Almost certainly nothing official. But ports don't care about official assignments — any service can open any port it wants. Common things you might actually find on 2108 in the wild:
- Development servers and local tooling that needed a free port
- Custom internal applications that picked an arbitrary registered number
- Nothing at all
To check what's listening on your own system:
Linux/macOS:
Windows:
If something is listening and you don't recognize it, that's worth investigating.
Why Unassigned and Dormant Ports Matter
The port registry is a shared namespace. When services claim ports and disappear, they leave behind registered-but-unusable numbers. This is a minor form of namespace pollution — anyone who wants to use 2108 for a new service officially has to work around the phantom registrations.
More practically: attackers know that obscure registered ports are less likely to be monitored than well-known ones. A service quietly opening port 2108 on your machine has better odds of going unnoticed than something appearing on port 80.
Dormant registered ports are useful precisely because they're forgettable. That cuts both ways.
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