From the course: CompTIA Security+ (SY0-601) Cert Prep: 8 Network Security Design and Implementation

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Network ports

Network ports

- [Illustrator] IP addresses may uniquely identify each system on a network, but those systems may be responsible for running many different services. That's where network ports come into play. Network ports are particular locations on a system associated with a specific application. Imagine that each computer on the network is an apartment building and each application is an individual apartment. The IP address of the computer is like the street address on the apartment building. But once you arrive at the building, you need specific instructions to get to the right apartment. The network port is like the apartment number, guiding traffic to the correct application. Network ports are represented using a 16-bit binary number. When you write that out in decimal form, we have two to the 16th power or 65,536 possible values just as with IP addresses we start counting at zero. So port numbers may range from zero to 65,535.…

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