Port 2454: IndX-DDS — A Ghost Registration

What Port 2454 Is

Port 2454 sits in the registered ports range (1024–49151). These are ports that individuals or organizations can claim with IANA — the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority — for a specific service or product.

IANA's registry shows port 2454 assigned to IndX-DDS, registered by Paul Carmichael on behalf of IndX Software Corporation. It operates on both TCP and UDP.¹

The catch: IndX Software Corporation was acquired by Siemens AG in December 2003.² Whatever IndX-DDS was — almost certainly IndX's internal data distribution component, used in their operations intelligence platform for process manufacturing — it hasn't been an active, independently deployed service for over twenty years.

Port 2454 is a ghost.

What IndX Software Was

IndX Software Corporation, founded in 1999, built operations intelligence software for Fortune 2000 process manufacturers. Their platform aggregated real-time production data and made it visible to plant managers and supply chain teams. The "DDS" in IndX-DDS likely referred to their Direct Data Store or Data Distribution Service — the layer that moved plant floor data around.

Siemens absorbed the company, folded the technology into their industrial automation stack, and port 2454 was left behind in IANA's registry like a forwarding address nobody checks.³

Why Registered-but-Orphaned Ports Exist

IANA doesn't reclaim ports when a company folds or gets acquired. Once registered, a port stays registered. The registry is a historical record as much as it is a living directory.

This matters for a few reasons:

• Firewall rules: Security teams sometimes block or flag port 2454. If you see it in a firewall ruleset, that rule was written when someone was cautious about IndX Software deployments. It's almost certainly irrelevant now.
• Port scanners: Automated scanners that look up port assignments will return "IndX-DDS" for 2454. This can be confusing if you see traffic on that port — it's not IndX-DDS, it's just a number that happens to be registered to an extinct product.
• Squatting: Because the port has a name attached to it, it's occasionally used by unrelated software that picked a number in the registered range without conflicting with something famous. Traffic on 2454 today is likely something local.

What Might Actually Be on Port 2454

If you see port 2454 active on a machine, it is not IndX-DDS. It could be:

• A custom application that chose this port arbitrarily
• Game server software that picked a port in this range
• A development service running locally
• A proxy, VPN, or tunneling tool configured to this port

There is no widely documented unofficial use of port 2454 in the way that, say, port 8080 is universally understood to be an alternative HTTP port.

How to Check What Is Listening

On Linux/macOS:

# Show the process using port 2454
sudo lsof -i :2454

# Or with ss (faster on modern Linux)
ss -tlnp sport = :2454

On Windows:

# Show connections on port 2454
netstat -ano | findstr :2454

# Then look up the PID
tasklist | findstr <PID>

If nothing is listening on port 2454, the port is dormant — just a number waiting to be used.