Port 2700: Unassigned — Registered but Unclaimed

The Registered Port Range

Port 2700 falls in the registered ports range (1024–49151). This range sits between the well-known ports (0–1023), which require root/administrator privileges to bind, and the ephemeral ports (49152–65535), which operating systems assign dynamically to outgoing connections.

Registered ports are maintained by IANA — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — and software vendors can formally request an assignment to stake a claim. But IANA's registry is voluntary. Nothing stops an application from using an unregistered port, and nothing prevents registered assignments from going stale when the software dies.

Port 2700 is currently unassigned in the IANA registry.¹

The KnowShowGo Question

Many port reference sites list port 2700 as belonging to KnowShowGo P2P — a peer-to-peer protocol described vaguely as enabling direct connections between devices. In practice, this appears to be an extinct or marginal software project. There is no RFC, no active documentation, no maintained codebase, and no meaningful deployment footprint. The association persists in port databases because those databases copy each other.

Don't treat this as a reliable identifier for traffic you see on port 2700.

Security Notes

Security scanning tools flag port 2700 as historically associated with malicious activity — specifically, that trojans or viruses have used it for communication in the past.² This is true of many ports. It means: if you see unexpected traffic on this port and you didn't put it there, investigate.

An open port 2700 on a machine you manage is worth understanding, not necessarily worth panicking about.

How to Check What's Using This Port

Linux / macOS:

# Show what process is listening on port 2700
ss -tlnp sport = :2700

# Or with lsof
lsof -i :2700

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2700

Then look up the process ID (PID) to identify the application.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The port system works because most software plays by the rules — well-known services claim well-known ports, and clients know where to knock. Unassigned ports in the registered range are the gaps: legitimately available, occasionally claimed by informal convention, and sometimes colonized by whatever needed a home.

Port 2700 is one of thousands of these gaps. It's not dangerous by nature. It's just unclaimed — which means if you see something listening here, you put it there, or something else did.