Port 3518: Artifact Message Server — A Registered Ghost

What Port 3518 Is

Port 3518 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These ports are not reserved by the operating system like the well-known ports below 1024, but they are supposed to be claimed through IANA — the organization that assigns names to numbers across the Internet.

Port 3518 was claimed. In June 2002, IANA registered it for a product called Artifact Message Server, built by a company called Artifact Software. The assigned contact was Ron Capwell.¹

That's where the trail ends. Artifact Software has no meaningful presence on the web. Artifact Message Server has no documentation, no user community, no source code, no forums. Whatever it was — a messaging layer for an internal product, an enterprise communication tool, something else entirely — it didn't survive.

The registration did.

What This Means in Practice

From a networking standpoint, port 3518 is unclaimed territory wearing a name tag.

Because IANA lists it as assigned, some port scanners and security tools will report "Artifact Message Server" when they see traffic on 3518. In practice, anything running on this port is almost certainly something else: a development server someone chose arbitrarily, an application that picked a number above 1024 and hoped for the best, or occasionally, malware that prefers obscure ports precisely because they look like noise.

How to Check What's Using This Port

If you see traffic on port 3518 and want to know what's generating it:

On Linux or macOS:

sudo ss -tlnp | grep 3518
# or
sudo lsof -i :3518

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3518
# Then look up the PID:
tasklist | findstr <PID>

If something is listening on 3518 and you didn't put it there, that's worth investigating.

Why Ghost Registrations Exist

The registered ports range was designed to prevent conflicts — if you claim a port number, others know not to use it. The system works when software survives. When a company folds or a product is abandoned, the registration lingers in the IANA database indefinitely. There's no automatic expiration, no reclamation process.

The result is a port space that's theoretically organized but practically full of historical artifacts — numbers claimed for software that no longer runs anywhere, by companies that no longer exist. Port 3518 is one of hundreds in this situation.

It's the Internet's equivalent of a reserved parking spot for a car that was crushed twenty years ago.