Port 3415: BCI Name Service — A Ghost in the Registry

What Port 3415 Is

Port 3415 sits in the registered ports range — the block from 1024 to 49151 that IANA maintains as a directory of services. Unlike the well-known ports below 1024 (HTTP at 80, SSH at 22), registered ports don't require elevated privileges to open. They're a reservation system: a company or developer claims a number so their software has a predictable home.

Port 3415 was claimed in February 2002 by Dennis Parker, registering it under the name BCI Name Service on behalf of a company called Broadcloud. ¹ Both TCP and UDP were registered.

That's nearly everything known about it.

The Ghost Registration Problem

No RFC was ever published for BCI Name Service. No developer documentation survives. No open source projects reference it. The company name "Broadcloud" appears in IANA's records and essentially nowhere else in any meaningful technical context.

This isn't unusual. IANA's registered ports range holds hundreds of entries like port 3415 — services registered with good intentions during a particular moment (often the early 2000s dot-com era), by companies that were acquired, pivoted, or dissolved before the protocol ever shipped. The port number persists in the registry long after the people and projects behind it are gone.

The registry isn't a sign that something works. It's a sign that someone once planned to make it work.

Is Anything Actually Using This Port?

Possibly, but not BCI Name Service. Unassigned or ghost-registered ports sometimes get adopted informally by:

• Internal enterprise tools that chose the number arbitrarily
• Game servers or voice chat applications looking for an open port
• Malware that uses obscure registered ports to blend into legitimate-looking traffic

If you're seeing traffic on port 3415 on your network, it isn't BCI Name Service — it's whatever your software or someone else's software decided to put there.

How to Check What's Listening

On Linux or macOS:

ss -tlnp | grep 3415
# or
lsof -i :3415

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :3415

With nmap (remote scanning):

nmap -sV -p 3415 <target>

The -sV flag tells nmap to probe the service and attempt to identify it by its banner — useful when the port number itself tells you nothing.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The registered ports range exists because software needs stable, predictable addresses. When MySQL defaults to port 3306 or PostgreSQL to 5432, every administrator in the world can configure firewall rules without reading documentation. The registration system created that shared vocabulary.

Ghost registrations like port 3415 are the friction in that system. The number is "taken" in the registry, which means a new service wanting that slot has to work around it — even though nothing real is using it. IANA does periodically reclaim abandoned registrations, but the process is slow.

Port 3415 is a small reminder that the port registry is a living document, not a permanent record — and that the distance between "registered" and "real" can be very large.