Port 2302: The ArmA Port — IANA Never Claimed It, Gamers Did

No official assignment. Port 2302 sits in the registered port range — the middle tier of the port numbering system, covering 1024 to 49151 — but IANA has never assigned it to any service. It's officially blank.

Unofficially, it belongs to Bohemia Interactive.

The Registered Port Range

Ports divide into three tiers. The well-known ports (0–1023) are the canonical ones: HTTP at 80, HTTPS at 443, SSH at 22. They require root or administrator privileges to bind and carry official IANA assignments with RFC backing.

The registered ports (1024–49151) are different. Any vendor can request an assignment, and IANA maintains a registry — but registration is optional, and vast stretches of this range sit unassigned. Port 2302 is one of them.

The dynamic and ephemeral ports (49152–65535) are unregistered by design, used for temporary outbound connections. Port 2302 isn't in that range — it's in the middle tier, available for assignment, just never assigned.

What Actually Runs Here

In 2002, Bohemia Interactive released Operation Flashpoint: Resistance. Their multiplayer server software originally defaulted to port 2234. Version 1.57 changed it to 2302 to fix a compatibility problem with DirectPlay 9 under Windows Internet Connection Sharing.¹

That bug fix became a fixture. ArmA: Armed Assault, ArmA 2, and ArmA 3 all inherited 2302 as the default game port. When you run an ArmA 3 dedicated server today, it occupies a cluster of ports starting at 2302:²

If you run multiple server instances, you increment by 5: the second server starts at 2307, the third at 2312. The whole cluster shifts together.

The ArmA series has an unusual longevity in the gaming world — a core community that has played continuously since 2001, running mods, missions, and persistent persistent multiplayer campaigns. Tens of thousands of dedicated servers have run on port 2302. IANA never assigned it. The community just collectively decided this is what it's for.

Checking What's Using Port 2302

If you see traffic on this port or want to know whether anything is listening:

macOS / Linux:

# What process is listening on 2302?
lsof -i :2302

# Or with netstat:
netstat -an | grep 2302

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2302

The last column in the netstat output is a process ID (PID). Cross-reference it with Task Manager or tasklist | findstr <PID> to find the application.

Check from outside your machine:

nmap -p 2302 <hostname-or-ip>

If you see port 2302 open on a machine that isn't running an ArmA server, that's worth investigating. Security scanners flag it occasionally for historical association with malware that chose random high ports — but the port itself is neutral. Any process can bind any available port.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The existence of unassigned registered ports isn't a flaw — it's the system working correctly. IANA's registry exists to prevent collisions among services that want to be publicly addressable, not to control every port on every machine.

Port 2302 demonstrates the informal layer that operates beneath IANA: de facto standards that emerge from popular software. No RFC governs it. No standards body blessed it. But any network admin who's ever managed game servers knows what it means.

The Internet runs on both kinds of assignments. The formal ones give you predictability. The informal ones give you history.