Port 3276: maxim-asics — A Name Without a Protocol

What Port 3276 Is

Port 3276 sits in the registered port range (1024–49151). These are ports that organizations can formally claim through IANA, the body that coordinates Internet numbering. Unlike the well-known ports below 1024, registered ports don't require special OS privileges to open, and IANA doesn't verify that a registered service is actually in wide use.

Port 3276's registration reads: service name maxim-asics, description "Maxim ASICs." That's it. No RFC. No protocol specification. No public implementation guide.

The Company Behind the Name

Maxim Integrated was a semiconductor company founded in 1983, headquartered in San Jose. It made analog and mixed-signal chips. In 2021, Analog Devices acquired Maxim for roughly $21 billion.¹

At some point before the acquisition, Maxim registered port 3276 with IANA, presumably for communication with or between their ASICs (Application-Specific Integrated Circuits). Whether that was for factory tooling, firmware update infrastructure, chip configuration, or something else entirely is not documented publicly.

The company is gone. The port name remains. The protocol, if it was ever written down, lives only on internal servers somewhere inside Analog Devices.

In Practice

Port 3276 is effectively invisible on the public Internet. No major security advisories name it. No known malware families use it as a command-and-control channel. Port scanners will rarely find it open on systems that aren't running Maxim-specific tooling.

If you see port 3276 open on a system you administer and you don't recognize what opened it, that's worth investigating.

How to Check What's Listening

Linux/macOS:

ss -tlnp | grep 3276
# or
lsof -i :3276

Windows:

netstat -aon | findstr :3276

The process ID in the output can be matched to an application in Task Manager or with tasklist /fi "PID eq <pid>".

Why Unassigned-in-Practice Ports Matter

The registered port range has thousands of entries like this one: formally claimed, minimally documented, rarely observed. They matter for a few reasons:

• Firewall rules need to account for them. A port with a name sounds safer than an unnamed one, but the name tells you almost nothing about actual traffic.
• Security audits flag unexpected open ports. Knowing that 3276 has a legitimate (if obscure) registration helps distinguish noise from signal.
• The registry is a historical record. Every entry reflects a moment when someone thought a piece of software would need its own port. Most of those moments are now forgotten.

The IANA registry is not a list of important ports. It's a list of ports that were once claimed. Port 3276 is a small reminder of the difference.