About Protocol Explorer

Protocol Explorer is a small independent project with one goal: make the conversations inside a network visible, so that a protocol name stops being a vocabulary word and becomes an explanation you can give out loud.

How the lessons are made

Every scenario is written against the published specification for that protocol — RFC 9110 and 9112 for HTTP, RFC 9293 for TCP, RFC 8446 for TLS 1.3, RFC 1034 and 1035 for DNS, and so on. The message fields, ports and header layouts come from those documents. What we add is the ordering: which message happens when, what each side now knows, and which bytes a reader can actually see.

Timestamps in the packet table are synthetic. Where a real capture would show encrypted or randomly generated bytes, the inspector marks the gap instead of inventing data. The tool is a teaching model, not evidence: when you need proof, open a real capture.

What we deliberately do not do

Protocol Explorer never observes your traffic, never asks for a network capture, and never connects to the example addresses in a lesson. Everything runs in your browser against a scripted scenario.

How the project is funded

Four protocols — HTTP, HTTPS, TCP and UDP — are free. A one-time $4.99 licence opens the remaining 29 protocols, the later steps and the complete byte-level inspector. There is no subscription, no advertising and no data resale. See the pricing page for the split.

Contact

Corrections, bug reports and requests for a protocol we have not covered yet: [email protected]. We read everything, and technical corrections usually ship within a few days.