Port 122: SMAKYNET — The Swiss Ghost in the Registry

Port 122 is assigned to SMAKYNET, a networking protocol for the Smaky line of computers. If you have never heard of the Smaky, you are not alone. Only 4,500 were ever built. But this port tells one of the more unusual stories in the IANA registry: a well-known port number, officially claimed and never relinquished, belonging to a Swiss educational computer that shaped a generation of students in the French-speaking canton of Vaud before quietly disappearing.

What SMAKYNET Was

SMAKYNET was the TCP/IP networking service for the Smaky computer platform¹. The Smaky (short for SMArt KeYboard) was a family of personal computers developed at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, starting in 1974². The machines ran their own operating system, PSI-OS, a real-time multitasking kernel, and used a proprietary local area network called Z-net that could push 1 Mb/s between machines³.

Port 122 was registered with IANA for both TCP and UDP, giving SMAKYNET a presence in the global port registry. The registration appears in RFC 1700, the 1994 "Assigned Numbers" document that cataloged the Internet's port assignments at the time⁴.

The Story Behind the Port

The Smaky was the creation of Jean-Daniel Nicoud, a professor of computer science at EPFL⁵. In 1974, Gordon Bell, Digital Equipment Corporation's technical director, invited Nicoud to work on a microcomputer project near Boston. By Christmas 1974, the Smaky 1 was functional. It was one of the first European microcomputers, predating comparable American machines by several months⁶.

Back in Switzerland, Nicoud continued developing the platform. His wife, Cathi Nicoud, a mathematician, founded the company Epsitec with a student to commercialize the machines⁷. Over the next two decades, Epsitec produced nine different Smaky models, evolving from Intel 8080 to Zilog Z80 to Motorola 68000 processors. The Smaky became the standard computer in French-speaking Swiss schools, a quiet fixture in classrooms across western Switzerland.

The networking side of the story belongs to Pierre Arnaud. Born in 1972 in Locarno, Arnaud discovered the Smaky 100 in 1987 when he entered a gymnasium in Yverdon-les-Bains and found a room full of them connected by Z-net⁸. He began writing assembly language programs for the Motorola 68000, some for pranks, some to improve network security. In 1989, at age 17, he joined Epsitec and never left. He maintained PSI-OS, built a debugger for the 680x0 processor, redesigned the Smaky 400 as a PCI board, and eventually created the Smaky Infini emulator that keeps the platform alive today⁹.

Pierre Arnaud is the contact listed in the IANA registry for port 122. He registered the port to give SMAKYNET a formal place in the Internet's addressing scheme. The Smaky stopped being manufactured in 1997. The port assignment remains.

The Well-Known Port Range

Port 122 sits in the well-known port range (0 through 1023), which is managed by IANA and typically requires root or system-level privileges to bind to on most operating systems¹⁰. These ports are reserved for established services: HTTP on 80, HTTPS on 443, SSH on 22.

SMAKYNET's presence in this range is a reminder that not every well-known port serves a well-known protocol. The early IANA registration process was less formal than today's RFC 6335 procedures¹¹, and port assignments from that era reflect a broader, more eclectic range of technologies, including some that never achieved global adoption.

Security Considerations

Port 122 has been flagged in some security databases in association with Backdoor.Upfudoor, a trojan that has historically communicated over this port¹². This does not mean port 122 is inherently dangerous. It means that because the port is rarely used for legitimate traffic, malware authors have occasionally exploited it as a communication channel.

If you see unexpected traffic on port 122, investigate. No mainstream service uses this port today.

How to Check What Is Listening on Port 122

Linux:

sudo ss -tlnp | grep :122
sudo lsof -i :122

macOS:

sudo lsof -i :122
netstat -an | grep 122

Windows:

netstat -an | findstr :122

If something is listening on port 122 and you did not put it there, that warrants immediate investigation.

Why Unassigned and Dormant Ports Matter

The Internet has 65,535 ports. Many are unassigned. Some, like port 122, are technically assigned but effectively dormant. These ports matter for several reasons:

For security, dormant ports are canaries. Traffic on a port that should be silent is a signal. If your firewall logs show connections on port 122, something unusual is happening.

For history, these ports are timestamps. Port 122 marks the moment a Swiss educational computer platform reached out to the global Internet and said, "We are here." The Smaky is gone. The registration persists. Every time someone queries the IANA registry and sees "smakynet" next to port 122, they encounter a trace of 4,500 machines that taught a generation of Swiss students how to use computers.

For architecture, the port system's design accommodates this gracefully. Dormant assignments do not waste resources. They sit in a registry, occupying a line of text, costing nothing, preserving the record.