Port 3453: PSC Update — A Barcode Port That Moonlighted for Bungie

What Port 3453 Is

Port 3453 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). These ports are tracked by IANA — the organization that manages the Internet's number assignments — but unlike well-known ports (0–1023), they don't require elevated privileges to use and aren't reserved exclusively for their listed service.

IANA's registry assigns port 3453 to PSC Update, a protocol for remotely updating and managing PSC-brand barcode scanners over TCP and UDP. PSC was an industrial barcode hardware company acquired by Datalogic in 2005. The registration dates to November 2001.¹

In practice, port 3453 is probably better recognized for something else entirely.

The Bungie Connection

Before Bungie made Halo, they made Myth: The Fallen Lords (1997) and Myth II: Soulblighter (1998) — real-time strategy games notable for their physics engine and brutal online multiplayer. Bungie ran game servers on bungie.net, and port 3453 was Myth's multiplayer port.²

Players who wanted to host games had to forward port 3453 through their routers. Bungie's net service for Myth ran until 2001–2002, when Bungie shut it down. The community eventually built replacement servers, carrying the port assignment forward.

So: a port registered for industrial scanner firmware updates, used by tens of thousands of online gamers for years. The registered range is full of stories like this — IANA registrations get stale, applications choose ports informally, and real-world use diverges from official records.

Checking What's on Port 3453

If something is listening on port 3453 on your machine, these commands will tell you what it is:

macOS / Linux:

# Show what process is bound to port 3453
lsof -i :3453

# Or with ss (Linux):
ss -tlnp | grep 3453

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3453

The process ID in the output can be cross-referenced in Task Manager or with tasklist to identify the application.

If nothing comes up, the port is closed — which is the expected state for almost all registered ports on any given machine.

Why Unregistered-in-Practice Ports Matter

The registered port range contains thousands of entries like PSC Update: formally assigned, technically valid, but dormant in the real world. This gap between paper assignments and actual use matters for a few reasons:

• Firewall rules written against port numbers can be misleading if the registered service isn't what's actually running there
• Security scanners flagging port 3453 as "PSC Update" may be wrong — something entirely different may be listening
• Developers sometimes pick from the registered range assuming a port is available, only to conflict with something the registry says is taken

The honest picture of any port is: check what's actually running, don't trust the label.