Port 2932: INCP — Registered, but Gone

What the Registry Says

Port 2932 is officially registered with the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) for both TCP and UDP under the service name INCP — Integrated Network Communications Protocol — with a Keith Paulsen listed as the assignee and contact.¹

That's the full extent of the paper trail.

No RFC documents INCP. No public implementation exists. No major software package claims it. The registration is real; the protocol, as far as the public Internet is concerned, is not.

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 2932 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). This range was historically called "user ports" — the zone where applications, services, and vendors register names with IANA to stake a claim on a port number for their software.

The well-known ports (0–1023) are the famous ones: HTTP at 80, HTTPS at 443, SSH at 22. Those require special system privileges to bind. The registered range requires only an IANA application — which explains why it contains thousands of ghost registrations like this one. Registering a port costs nothing and expires nothing. A protocol can be abandoned while its reservation persists indefinitely.

If You're Seeing Traffic Here

If a process on your machine is listening on port 2932, it isn't INCP — it's almost certainly an application that chose this port arbitrarily, a development server, a game, or something custom. That's normal behavior in the registered range.

To see what's actually listening:

macOS / Linux:

lsof -i :2932

or

ss -tlnp | grep 2932

Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr :2932

The output will show the process ID and name. That tells you what's actually there.

Why Ghost Registrations Exist

The registered port range was designed with optimism — the assumption that anyone registering a port would build something real. In practice, protocols get registered speculatively, companies register ports for internal tools that never ship publicly, and some registrations simply age out of relevance when the product dies.

IANA has tightened the registration process over the years,² but the legacy entries remain. Port 2932 is one of thousands in this category: technically claimed, practically empty.