At PegaSys, we specialize in the low-level, deep aspects of the Ethereum ecosystem. [In case you didn’t know, PegaSys is the Protocol Engineering Groups and Systems team here at ConsenSys.]

We’re addressing an array of challenges in the Ethereum ecosystem: privacy, sharding, consensus, scalability, etc. as well as working on Pantheon, a Java-based Ethereum client that will be released on October 30th in Devcon4 (Prague). Pantheon will serve as the public chain foundation for our Enterprise edition, to be released some months after Devcon4.

Building Pantheon means implementing the network stack of Ethereum (ÐΞVp2p) from scratch, and ensuring it’s correct behavior and interoperability at all times with other clients like Geth and Parity is not easy.

To enable us to debug and observe the network behavior of Ethereum clients, a few months ago we decided to develop a set of Wireshark dissectors for Ethereum ÐΞVp2p. See it in action:

An animation showing the dissection of a live capture of devp2p RLPx discovery protocol traffic from Geth. Shown: packet tree, detail view, statistics, service response times.

And today we are announcing their release as Open Source Software. We hope it will contribute in facilitating the work researchers (such as the team that reported Eclipse Attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in discovery), engineers, devops, and anybody who is curious about Ethereum’s network traffic.

But before we delve into the dissectors themselves, let me give you a bird’s eye view of the ÐΞVp2p stack in Ethereum clients.