This method has the additional advantage of enabling the message itself to remain private.įor our web server example, we can be confident that ports 80 and 443 will be relevant for either port 22 or 3389, depending on the type of operating system (and configuration). It’s much easier and faster to add a specific office number to the address, allowing the message to be directly delivered.

This method might work for small volumes of messages, but it quickly becomes unmanageable. To get a message to a particular office, you could rely on someone reading an incoming message and looking for indication of whom the message is intended. You can think of the port as a room number in an office building and the IP address as equivalent to the building’s street address. We need a mechanism to go one step deeper in addressing the system to focus on the service. Even the simplest system, such as a web server, offers not only web pages, but also remote access to manage the system itself. Ports provide the ability to address these services uniquely. It’s common for each networked system to have at least 1 IP address and for each system to offer multiple services on the network. We won’t cover IPv6 in this blog post, but as it also uses ports, what follows is equally applicable.

IPv6, the next version, has a far more extensive addressing scheme, comprising of 8 16-bit hexadecimal values separated by colons, i.e., 2001:0db8:85a3:0000:0000:8a2e:0370:7334. This is part of the fourth version of the IP protocol (IPv4).

Today, the most common IP address format uses four octets separated by full stops, i.e., 192.168.1.1. Almost everyone will recognize an IP address as a mechanism of ‘uniquely’ identifying a system on a network.

Router security scan