What is winpcap software

Thanks: Re: WinPcap Message 2 of Message 3 of Have you ever installed Wireshark? Message 4 of Why should I I know what it does, Message 5 of Wireshark requires WinPCap and this is the most obvious reason why you might have it installed.

Message 6 of Message 7 of No, it won't be RouterStats. Message 8 of Message 9 of I can't think what else it might be so I'd suggest removing it and see if anything stops working!

Message 10 of Message 11 of Posts: 5, Fixes: 7. Message 12 of WinPcap is an open source library for packet capture and network analysis for the Win32 platforms. Most networking applications access the network through widely used operating system primitives such as sockets.

It is easy to access data on the network with this approach since the operating system copes with the low level details protocol handling, packet reassembly, etc. Sometimes, however, the 'easy way' is not up to the task, since some applications require direct access to packets on the network.

That is, they need access to the "raw" data on the network without the interposition of protocol processing by the operating system. The purpose of WinPcap is to give this kind of access to Win32 applications; it provides facilities to:.

This set of capabilities is obtained by means of a device driver, that is installed inside the networking portion of Win32 kernels, plus a couple of DLLs. All these features are exported through a powerful programming interface, easily exploitable by the applications and available on different OSes.

The main goal of this manual is to document this interface, with the help of several examples. If you are interested in starting your exploration right away you can go directly to the WinPcap user's manual.

The WinPcap programming interface can be used by many types of network tools for analysis, troubleshooting, security and monitoring. In particular, classical tools that rely on WinPcap are:. This means that it isn't able to block, filter or manipulate the traffic generated by other programs on the same machine: it simply "sniffs" the packets that transit on the wire. Therefore, it does not provide the appropriate support for applications like traffic shapers, QoS schedulers and personal firewalls.