Port 2207: hpssd — HP's Printer Status Daemon for Linux

Port 2207 is assigned to hpssd — the HP Status and Services Daemon, a component of HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing). IANA registered this assignment in May 2006. ¹

What hpssd Was

Getting HP printers to work properly on Linux used to require a lot of machinery. HPLIP was HP's answer: an open-source driver stack that handled printing, scanning, and fax for HP hardware on Linux systems.

The hpssd daemon was the message broker at the center of that stack. It:

• Relayed status messages from HP devices to HPLIP client applications
• Handled communication between the CUPS printing system and HP-specific tooling
• Ran as a background service, listening on TCP port 2207 — typically on localhost

In later versions of HPLIP, hpssd was deprecated and replaced by a D-Bus based architecture. The port largely faded from use as Linux printer support matured.

The CVE

In 2008, a vulnerability was discovered in the hpssd message parser: CVE-2008-2941. ²

A crafted packet sent to TCP port 2207 could cause a denial of service — and in earlier versions, the parser could be abused for arbitrary command execution. ³

The daemon was written in Python, often ran with elevated privileges, and in some configurations was reachable beyond localhost. Nessus shipped a dedicated plugin just to detect exposed hpssd instances. ⁴

This is a recurring story in systems software: a background daemon, written to solve a hard interoperability problem, quietly listening on a port, waiting for someone to ask it the wrong question.

What Range This Port Belongs To

Port 2207 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). These ports are:

• Not reserved for system use (unlike well-known ports below 1024)
• Registered with IANA by specific applications or vendors
• Not guaranteed to be in active use on any given machine

A registered port means someone filed the paperwork. It doesn't mean the service is running. On most systems today, nothing is listening on 2207.

Checking What's on This Port

To see if anything is listening on port 2207 on your system:

# Linux/macOS - show listening processes with port info
ss -tlnp | grep 2207

# macOS alternative
lsof -i :2207

# Windows
netstat -ano | findstr :2207

If nothing appears, nothing is listening. That's the expected result on any modern system without HPLIP installed.

Why Unassigned-in-Practice Ports Matter

Even registered ports with a specific purpose can effectively become unassigned over time. When a daemon is deprecated, its port doesn't automatically get reclaimed — it just sits there, registered on paper, used by nothing.

This creates ambiguity: port scanners, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems have to decide whether traffic on port 2207 is a printer driver trying to work or something unexpected. The answer shapes how you configure your network perimeter.

Ports that were once active and are now mostly quiet are worth knowing about. Something listening on 2207 today is worth investigating — not because it's alarming, but because it's unusual.