What Port 1722 Is
Port 1722 is registered with IANA for HKS License Manager (hks-lm), a license management service developed by Hibbitt, Karlsson & Sorensen — the engineering software company that made ABAQUS, a finite element analysis tool used in aerospace, automotive, and structural engineering.1
HKS was acquired by Dassault Systèmes in 2005 and absorbed into the SIMULIA brand. The HKS License Manager itself was a network licensing daemon: it sat on a server, listened on port 1722, and handed out licenses to engineers running ABAQUS simulations across a workgroup. If you exceeded your license count, the software refused to run. Standard fare for expensive engineering CAD/CAE packages of the 1990s and early 2000s.
The assignment covers both TCP and UDP.
The Port Range
Port 1722 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). This range is managed by IANA, meaning vendors and developers can formally register a port number for their application. Registration does not mean the port is in wide use — it means someone filled out the paperwork. The registered range contains thousands of assignments for software ranging from ubiquitous (port 1433: Microsoft SQL Server) to historical curiosities like this one.
Contrast with:
- Well-known ports (0–1023): Reserved for core Internet protocols — HTTP, SMTP, SSH, DNS. Controlled tightly.
- Ephemeral ports (49152–65535): Temporary ports assigned dynamically by the OS for outgoing connections. No registration needed.
What You'd Find on Port 1722 Today
Realistically? Probably nothing, unless you're in a specialized engineering environment running very old ABAQUS infrastructure. Most modern license management for this class of software has migrated to FlexNet (formerly Flexera), which uses different ports.
If you find port 1722 open on a machine you don't recognize, it warrants investigation. Unexpected open ports can be:
- Legitimate legacy software nobody documented
- Malware using an obscure registered port to blend in2
- Misconfigured services meant to run on a different port
How to Check What's Listening
On Linux or macOS:
On Windows:
The process ID from netstat output can be cross-referenced in Task Manager or with:
Why Unassigned (and Obscure) Ports Matter
The port registry serves as a coordination layer: when two applications want to use the same port number, they conflict. Registration is how that's avoided — in theory. In practice, the registered range has hundreds of assignments for products that have been discontinued, acquired, or forgotten. They remain in the registry because IANA rarely removes them.
This matters for network security: port scanners will flag port 1722 as "hks-lm" if they recognize the assignment. That label might inspire false confidence — "oh, it's just a license manager" — when in fact nothing legitimate is running there.
The honest rule: verify everything. A port's registered name tells you what was intended to run there, not what is running there.
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