344
Summary
- // typical exposure
- Anomalous (rarely legitimately open) — PDAP is an obscure, largely defunct early-1990s protocol with no documented current legitimate deployment, so a responsive 344/tcp should be treated as an anomaly warranting investigation rather than an expected internal or internet-facing service.
- // if you see it open
- No current mainstream software, CVE, or documented scanning/exploitation trend uses 344/tcp. It is an obscure, largely defunct early-1990s protocol assignment; if seen open today it most likely reflects a stray/legacy service, a misconfigured custom application, or noise rather than a known-exploited protocol. Aggregator-site claims that the port was 'flagged as a virus' are templated boilerplate applied broadly across many ports, not a confirmed, dated incident.
About port 344/tcp.
Port 344/tcp carries pdap, the Prospero Data Access Protocol; it has essentially no modern deployment footprint, so a responsive port 344 should be treated as anomalous rather than expected — whether on the public internet or on an internal network.
IANA's registry lists 344/tcp and 344/udp identically as pdap, assigned to B. Clifford Neuman, with the Registration Date, Modification Date, and Reference columns all blank in the source CSV. No RFC number is cited for this specific port assignment.
Prospero was a distributed file/directory system built by Neuman and S. Augart at USC's Information Sciences Institute in the early-to-mid 1990s. It layered a customized logical view of files over existing access protocols (FTP, NFS, AFS, local files); PDAP was the client-server component handling that data access. A related but distinct Prospero Directory Service is described in the informational RFC 1409 (1993).
No current, actively maintained software, CVE, or documented internet-scanning trend references this port. Aggregator "port lookup" sites simply restate the IANA assignment without evidence of live use; one site's boilerplate "flagged as a virus" language is templated across many ports and is not a dated, port-344-specific incident.
- IANA assignment
pdap— "Prospero Data Access Protocol"; assignee B. Clifford Neuman; dual-registered 344/tcp + 344/udp [Confirmed] — IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry- Registration/Modification Date
- blank in the IANA registry (not fabricated) [Confirmed] — IANA CSV
- IANA Reference/RFC
- blank in the registry; no RFC cited for this specific assignment [Confirmed] — IANA CSV
- Range class
- well-known (0–1023)
Primary use
Prospero Data Access Protocol, client-server data-access component of the Prospero distributed file/directory system (USC/ISI, early 1990s)
Common software
none current/actively maintained found; only historical USC/ISI reference implementations
Exposure/scanning history
no sourced evidence of scanning trends, honeypot reports, or CVEs; aggregator "flagged as virus" language is templated boilerplate, not port-344-specific
- Related, distinct service
- Prospero Directory Service documented in informational RFC 1409 (1993) [Likely] — datatracker.ietf.org
- Overall risk posture
- obscure/defunct protocol with negligible modern footprint; an open port 344 most likely reflects a stray/legacy or misconfigured service rather than a known-exploited protocol [Likely] — IANA registry
About port 344/udp.
Port 344/udp carries pdap, the Prospero Data Access Protocol; it should generally stay off the public internet, since Prospero is an obscure early-1990s distributed file/directory system with no evidence of active deployment today.
IANA registers 344 as pdap — "Prospero Data Access Protocol" — dual-assigned on both TCP and UDP, with assignee B. Clifford Neuman and a blank Reference column (no RFC is cited in the registry).
Prospero was a distributed file and directory system built by B. Clifford Neuman at USC in the early 1990s; PDAP was its client-server data-access component, letting clients query and retrieve objects from Prospero servers. This background reflects standard networking history but was not independently re-verified against a live secondary source in this pass.
No community-sourced sightings of software actively using 344/udp, and no scanning-activity or exposure writeups, were found in this pass — a SpeedGuide.net lookup returned HTTP 403 and Wikipedia's port list carried no entry for 344. Research budget (WebSearch) was exhausted before a fuller sweep could run, so absence of findings here should be read as incomplete coverage rather than confirmed absence of activity.
- IANA assignment
pdap— "Prospero Data Access Protocol"; reference blank; assignee B. Clifford Neuman; dual-registered 344/tcp + 344/udp [Confirmed] — the IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry (line 666); IANA service-names-port-numbers registry- Range class
- well-known (0–1023)
- Prevalence
- not measured this pass [Unknown]
- Related ports
- 344/tcp (dual registration of the same service) [Confirmed] — IANA registry
Primary use
Prospero Data Access Protocol, the data-access component of the Prospero distributed file/directory system (B. Clifford Neuman, USC, early 1990s)
Other/unofficial uses
none identified
Security implications
no CVEs, advisories, or scanning writeups found this pass; treat an open 344/udp as unusual given the protocol's age and apparent disuse
Typically seen on
no confirmed modern deployments; historically associated with Prospero servers [Unknown]
- Analyst note
- research this pass was limited to the IANA registration; a fuller sweep for community sightings and scanning telemetry should be re-run with search budget available.
Service assignments.
| Name | Protocol | Description | Open frequency |
|---|---|---|---|
| pdap | UDP | Prospero Data Access Protocol | 0.04% |
| pdap | TCP | Prospero Data Access Protocol | 0.00% |
Service assignments from the IANA Service Name and Transport Protocol Port Number Registry, with open-frequency data from nmap-services.