What Range This Port Belongs To
Port 3014 sits in the registered ports range, which spans 1024 to 49151. IANA administers this range for services that have applied for an official assignment — software vendors, protocol designers, and occasionally individuals who wanted a stable, documented port number for their application.
Getting a port number in this range isn't especially hard. You fill out a form, provide a contact name, and IANA records the assignment. There's no requirement to publish an RFC, release software, or prove the service actually exists.
The Official Record
IANA lists port 3014 as broker_service on both TCP and UDP, with a private individual (Dale Bethers) listed as the assignee and contact.1
That's where the trail ends. There is no RFC defining the protocol. There is no public documentation explaining what a "broker service" on this port was meant to do. There is no known software that uses it. The registration exists, but the service it was meant to describe never became anything publicly known.
This happens more often than you'd expect. The registered range has thousands of entries. Some are for thriving protocols used by millions of devices. Some are for applications that were abandoned before shipping. Some are for internal corporate tools that were never intended for general use. Port 3014 appears to be in that last category — a name claimed, a port held, a concept that went no further.
How to Check What's Listening on This Port
If you see traffic on port 3014, it isn't the broker service — it's something else. Applications frequently use unoccupied or lightly used registered ports for ad hoc purposes, and port 3014 is effectively unclaimed in any practical sense.
To see what process is using it on your machine:
macOS / Linux:
or
Windows:
then cross-reference the PID with Task Manager.
If something unexpected is listening on 3014, check the process name. Unoccupied registered ports are sometimes chosen by malware specifically because they're unlikely to be blocked by default firewall rules.
Why Ghost Registrations Happen
The IANA registry is not a list of active protocols. It's a list of claims. A claim without follow-through leaves a port number in a strange state: officially spoken for, practically available, occasionally squatted on by software that has no business using it.
This is a minor structural quirk of how the port system works. IANA can't force registrants to build anything. It can't revoke assignments for inactivity. So the registered range accumulates these quiet entries — ports with names but no implementations, addresses with no houses.
Port 3014 is one of them.
Frequently Asked Questions
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