Port 60794 — A Port That Belongs to No One

What Range Does This Port Belong To?

Port 60794 sits in the Dynamic and Private Ports range: 49152-65535. This range will never be assigned to any service by IANA. It exists specifically for temporary use.

According to RFC 6335, port numbers divide into three categories:

• System Ports (0-1023): Assigned by IANA for well-known services like HTTP, DNS, SSH
• User Ports (1024-49151): Assigned by IANA for registered services
• Dynamic Ports (49152-65535): Never assigned. Reserved for private, temporary, and ephemeral use

Port 60794 is in that third category. IANA explicitly decided not to control this range. The decision reflects something pragmatic about the Internet: there will always be way more temporary connections than there are assignable port numbers.

Why This Range Exists

When you open your browser and visit a website, your computer needs a port to send that traffic from. The server uses port 443 (HTTPS), but your machine needs to pick something. It can't use a well-known port—those are supposed to be servers listening. So it reaches into the dynamic range and grabs one: maybe 60794. When you close the page, that port gets released back into the pool. Another application might use it seconds later.

This happens thousands of times per second across the Internet. Ephemeral ports make that possible. Without the dynamic range, the system would collapse.

What Commonly Uses Port 60794?

Honestly: anything. Your mail client. Your video call. A Docker container. A game connecting to servers. Python downloading a library. The port number itself doesn't matter because the application chose it arbitrarily, temporarily, and will abandon it when done.

If you see traffic on port 60794 on your network, you need to look at which application is using it, not what the port number means. The port number tells you nothing.

How to Check What's Listening on This Port

If you want to see what—if anything—is actually using port 60794 on your system right now:

On Linux:

lsof -i :60794
netstat -tulpan | grep 60794
ss -tulpan | grep 60794

On macOS:

lsof -i :60794

On Windows:

netstat -ano | findstr 60794

The likelihood is you'll see nothing, because this port probably isn't being used at this exact moment. Ephemeral ports are use-and-release infrastructure.

Why Unassigned Ports Matter

The dynamic range's existence is a statement about how the Internet works. IANA could have tried to assign every port. They didn't. They looked at the problem and said: "Some infrastructure is too granular to control from the top. We'll set boundaries and let systems manage themselves."

This is the Internet working as designed. Not everything needs permission. Some things need to be wild and temporary and locally managed.

Port 60794 is probably carrying something important right now—on someone's machine, somewhere. A transaction. A sync. A query. And in three seconds, it won't be. Another port will take its place. The anonymity is the feature.

• What Are Ephemeral Ports? — Coursera
• What are dynamic port numbers and how do they work? — TechTarget
• RFC 6335: Internet Assigned Numbers Authority Procedures — RFC Editor
• How to Check Open TCP/IP Ports — How-To Geek
• Linux: What Process is Listening on a Port — Linux Config
• Ephemeral port — Wikipedia