thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

Networking Fundamentals · Intermediate

Socket

The combination of an IP address, transport protocol and port number that identifies one endpoint of a connection.

Definition

A TCP connection is uniquely identified by a socket pair, often called the five-tuple: source IP, source port, destination IP, destination port and protocol. Operating systems expose sockets as the programming interface for network communication.

Example

192.168.1.10:52344 to 93.184.215.14:443 over TCP is one socket pair.

Exam tip

The five-tuple (two IPs, two ports, protocol) is what stateful firewalls and NAT tables track.

Related terms