What is a Software Port?

What is a Port?

A port is a point from which a certain connection is made. There are two types of ports in a computer system one is hardware port and the other is the software port. 

What is a Hardware Port?

Hardware ports basically comprise of USB port, HDMI port, USB type C port, LAN port etcetera. These hardware ports help us in making a certain connection between the computer system and any other device, for example, a USB port helps us in transferring files from our computer system to a certain pen drive or USB thumb drive or any Smartphone and vice versa. But the software ports help us in making different kinds of connections that are not hardware type. 

What is a Software Port?

Software port is basically a port through which a certain software connection is made. There are two types of software ports one is the TCP port and the other is the UDP port. There is a total of 65535 TCP and UDP ports. A TCP port basically makes a three-way handshake before establishing a certain connection, whereas a UDP port does not make any such three-way handshake but is basically used when we need speed in our connection for example in video streaming as in YouTube. 

The following table below shows us the popular software ports that are common in our day to day computer work: 

21: File Transfer Protocol FTP

22: secure shell (SSH) 

23: Telnet remote login service

25: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SMTP

53: Domain Name System DNS service

80: Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP used in world wide web

110: Post Office Protocol POP3

119: Network news transfer protocol NNTP 

443: Hypertext transfer protocol secured HTTPS 

These are a few commonly software ports in our day to day computer usage. Among all the ports the ports from 0-1023 are called well-known ports, Ports from 1024-49151 are called registered ports: vendors used days for their applications, Ports after 49151 are called dynamic or private ports.

How to scan for Open Ports?

Tools such as in "Nmap" help us in scanning open ports in a certain system. Nmap comes pre-installed in Kali Linux and can also be downloaded in other Linux distributions, there is a graphical version of an app named "zenmap" and it can be downloaded on a Windows system as well. Port scanning is basically the most important step of a pen-testing process, this basically helps us in determining the processes running on a certain target system, if a vulnerability is present in that certain port or the software using that certain port this vulnerability can be exploited to gain access to that remote system. Recently the outbreak of the wanna cry ransomware took advantage of a zero-day vulnerability that resided in the SMB 445 port, it actually took advantage of an SMB V1 vulnerability. 

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