Packet Buddy - Chatting with your PCAPs, via the Cloud or Locally on Your Own Machine! - AIHUB-2000#

Speakers: Dave Zacks (Cisco), Prapanch Ramamoorthy (Cisco)

• Why: Not a core interest, but a genuinely novel application of LLMs to a networking-native workflow — querying packet captures conversationally — and it's open source, so it can be inspected and run locally rather than just watched.
• What: An open-source tool ("Packet Buddy") that lets an LLM analyze your own Wireshark captures: answering what traffic is present, what errors it detects, and explaining packet flows — deployable either in the cloud or locally. (from abstract only)
• How: Feeds pcap data to a choice of LLMs and lets the analyst interrogate it in natural language; the local-deployment option keeps sensitive captures on-prem.
• Where applicable: Any network operator doing packet-level troubleshooting; most valuable as a signal of where LLM-assisted network diagnostics is heading. Note the privacy/trust question of sharing captures with cloud models — the local mode exists precisely because of it.