Roku Network Log

I leave my Roku box powered off when not in use. This log of network activity shows why.

The Roku box was powered on and left untouched. This is a log/trace of network activity originating from the Roku box over a random 35 minutes, about an hour after it had been powered on. I waited the hour to give it time to do any initial housekeeping. The box was running version 9.4.0 of the Roku operating system. The log was created by a Peplink router and has been edited to show only the relevant information.

OBSERVATIONS

1. The ROKU box made 857 network requests in 35 minutes, an average of 24 requests/minute. Many of the requests are for DNS; excluding DNS, there were still 240 outgoing requests to assorted IP addresses, an average of 7/minute. Again, this is while doing nothing.
   
   
2. It is doing TCP for (legacy un-encrypted) DNS rather than UDP which is the standard. Why? One guess is that it is trying to bypass DNS servers the router might be configured to use. Also, the Roku box is using Google for DNS (IP addresses 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4) even though the router it was connected to was not using Google for DNS. So, the Roku box accepted a dynamic LAN-side IP address via DHCP but ignored the DNS servers also offered by DHCP. Sneaky. I checked with nmap and, sure enough, IP address 8.8.8.8 does have TCP port 53 open.
   
   
3. Many of the requests are to TCP port 80 which is HTTP and not encrypted. There is no excuse for that anymore. I checked four of the IP addresses that were sent un-encrypted data: 3.211.157.115, 3.225.92.8, 52.3.144.142 and 54.237.226.164. According to ipinfo.io, all four IP addresses belong to Netflix.
   
   
4. The outbound requests to port 2350 (at the end) are unusual because the port is unusual. This Roku Community item: Roku communication on TCP port 2350?, makes it seem as if the requests sent to port 2350 are not necessary. So, I blocked outbound requests to TCP port 2350 from the ROKU box in my router and . . . the Roku box seemed to work just fine, although all I tried was Netflix and one other Roku channel. Someone who commented on this Reddit post Roku phoning home? said that their Roku works fine with port 2350 blocked by the router.