Port 1295 is officially assigned to EHTP (End-by-Hop Transmission Protocol), a connection-oriented transport service that was proposed in 2002. The protocol never made it past draft stage, but the port assignment remains.
What EHTP Was Supposed to Be
EHTP was designed as "the connection-oriented transport service for the reliable or unreliable delivery of data packets with possible violation of a sequence."1 That's technical language for: a way to send data through networks that might have incompatible addressing systems, with the flexibility to guarantee delivery or not, depending on what you need.
The protocol aimed to solve a specific problem: how do you unite networks that use completely different address spaces? Networks that can't talk to each other directly because they don't share a common addressing scheme. EHTP proposed operating at the transport layer to bridge these incompatible networks while maintaining end-to-end communication.1
Key Features That Never Shipped
EHTP had some interesting ideas:
- Compatible addressing — Worked with the Unified Memory Space Protocol (UMSP, RFC 3018)
- Mixed routing — Used both addresses and labels, with labels distributed when connections were established
- Dynamic resource management — Could deallocate resources on gateways when traffic stopped, then redistribute them transparently
- Efficient headers — Only 8 bytes of overhead for unreliable delivery
- UDP-based — Ran on top of UDP at the lower layer1
Port 1295 was allocated by IANA for both TCP and UDP, though the draft specification primarily described UDP usage.2
What Happened
Alexander Bogdanov authored the Internet-Draft in July 2002.1 It expired without being adopted. The IETF notes that the document "has no formal standing in the IETF standards process" and explicitly does not endorse it.1
The protocol never became an RFC. No implementations appear to have survived (if they ever existed). The author's email address is now invalid.
But the port assignment remains. Port 1295 sits in the IANA registry, pointing to a protocol that was never finished.
Why Unfinished Protocols Matter
The Internet is built on standards that survived the process—protocols that got written, reviewed, implemented, tested, and eventually adopted. Port 1295 represents the other side: an idea that got far enough to request a port number but not far enough to become infrastructure.
These abandoned protocols tell a story about what problems people were trying to solve in their era. In 2002, bridging incompatible network address spaces was a real concern. Whether EHTP was the right solution or not, someone cared enough to write it down and submit it for consideration.
Checking What's Actually Using Port 1295
Since EHTP never shipped, anything listening on port 1295 is either:
- A different service using an officially assigned but unused port
- Malware or unauthorized software taking advantage of an obscure port
- Nothing at all
To see what's listening on port 1295:
On Linux/Mac:
On Windows:
If you find something listening here, it's almost certainly not EHTP. The protocol never existed beyond paper.
The Registered Ports Range
Port 1295 falls in the registered ports range (1024-49151). These ports are assigned by IANA for specific services, but they're not as universally recognized as the well-known ports (0-1023). Applications can request registration for a port in this range if they're developing a service that needs a consistent identifier.
The process worked for EHTP: they got the port. The protocol just didn't survive to use it.
Related Ports
Other ports in the surrounding range serve various purposes:
- Port 1293 — IPSec (IP Payload Compression Protocol)
- Port 1294 — CMMdriver (unspecified service)
- Port 1296 — DPRoxy (unspecified service)
None of these are commonly encountered in typical network environments.
Frequently Asked Questions
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