Port 114: Audio News Multicast — The Ghost of Streaming Past

Port 114 was once assigned to a service called Audio News Multicast. Today, IANA lists it as unassigned. The service name was audionews. The protocol is gone. The port is empty.

But there is a story here, and it is worth telling.

What Port 114 Was

Port 114 was registered for both TCP and UDP under the service name audionews, described as "Audio News Multicast."¹ The registration appears in RFC 1340, the July 1992 edition of the IANA Assigned Numbers document.² It was also assigned a dedicated multicast address: 224.0.1.7 for IPv4 and FF0X:0:0:0:0:0:0:107 for IPv6.³

The registration tag is [MXF2], which identifies Martin Forssen at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden.² Forssen was working at the intersection of networking and audio at a time when streaming sound across the Internet was an experimental act.

The MBone Era

To understand port 114, you need to understand what the Internet looked like in 1992. Most routers did not support IP multicast. Sending audio or video to multiple recipients meant sending a separate copy to each one, which was wildly inefficient. The solution was the MBone (Multicast Backbone), a virtual network overlay created by Van Jacobson, Steve Deering, and Stephen Casner that tunneled multicast packets across the existing Internet infrastructure.⁴

The MBone made its debut at the March 1992 IETF meeting in San Diego, where 20 sites listened to the proceedings over the network.⁴ By 1993, researchers at Xerox PARC were streaming live band performances over it.⁵ In 1994, the Rolling Stones played a concert at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas that was multicast to roughly 200 computers worldwide, limited only by the rarity of MBone-capable hardware.⁵

Audio News Multicast lived in this world. The idea was straightforward: broadcast audio news content to multiple listeners simultaneously using IP multicast. One sender, many receivers, no wasted bandwidth on duplicate streams. It was the architecture that would eventually become podcasting and Internet radio, just two decades too early and dependent on infrastructure that most of the Internet did not yet support.

What Happened

The MBone era faded. Commercial unicast streaming (led by RealNetworks in 1995 and later by the modern streaming stack) proved more practical on an Internet where multicast routing remained the exception rather than the rule. Audio News Multicast never achieved widespread adoption. IANA deprecated the port assignment in June 2004.⁶

Martin Forssen continued working in networking. He later co-authored RFC 4256, which defined generic message exchange authentication for SSH.⁷ The audio multicast dream moved on without him, eventually realized in forms he might not have predicted: Spotify, podcasts, Internet radio.

The Port Today

Port 114 is a well-known port (range 0 to 1023). Well-known ports are controlled by IANA and typically require superuser privileges to bind to on Unix-like systems.¹ Even though port 114 is unassigned, it retains this privileged status.

No mainstream service currently uses port 114. Some security databases note that the port has been observed in Trojan communications,⁸ but this is true of many low-numbered ports and does not indicate anything inherently dangerous about port 114 itself. Attackers use whatever doors are unlocked.

Checking What Is Listening on Port 114

Linux:

sudo ss -tlnp | grep :114
sudo netstat -tlnp | grep :114

macOS:

sudo lsof -i :114

Windows:

netstat -an | findstr :114

If something is listening on port 114 and you did not put it there, investigate. No legitimate modern service should be using this port.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The Internet has 65,535 ports. IANA has assigned only a fraction of them. The unassigned ones are not wasted space. They are the reserve capacity of a system designed to grow. Every protocol that will ever exist needs a port to call home, and the fact that there are tens of thousands of open numbers means the system can absorb whatever the future invents.

Port 114 also tells us something about how standards work. A port gets assigned. The service never catches on. The assignment gets deprecated. The port returns to the pool. It is not failure. It is the system working as designed: try things, keep what works, reclaim what does not.