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Why WinPcap?
WinPcap is:
- Free. WinPcap is released under the
BSD open source licence. This
means that you have total freedom to modify and use it with your
application, even if it's commercial. The binary and source code
are available here.
- High performance. WinPcap implements all of the
classic optimizations described in the packet capture literature
(e.g., kernel-level filtering and buffering, context switch
mitigation, partial packet copy), plus some original ones, like
JIT filter compilation and kernel-level statistic processing.
For these reasons, WinPcap outperforms other comparable
approaches.
- Popular. WinPcap is used as the network interface by
many tools -- both free and
commercial including protocol analyzers, network monitors,
network intrusion detection systems, sniffers, traffic
generators, network testers, etc. Some of these tools, like
Wireshark,
Nmap,
Snort,
WinDump,
ntop are very well known in
the networking community. WinPcap is downloaded thousands of
times every day.
- Tested and Reliable. Many users have contributed over
the years in testing WinPcap on a wide range of platforms, and
in finding the most subtle bugs. WinPcap developers are
experienced Windows driver writers, and their approach to
software development emphasizes rock-solid stability. Remember:
a buggy driver means blue screens.
- Easy to use for the final user. WinPcap is
distributed as a single small executable that runs on every
supported operating system. You launch the executable, and from
that moment Windows is able to capture and send raw network
traffic. It couldn't be easier.
- Easy to use for the programmer. Every version of
WinPcap comes with a developer's
pack that includes documentation, libraries and include
files needed to immediately start with your own new application.
The developer's pack contains a set of sample programs ready to
be compiled both with Visual Studio and Cygnus, and are
available as excellent starting points.
- Multi-platform. WinPcap is actively maintained on
Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003.
WinPcap can also work on Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME,
but these OSes are not
maintained any longer. Windows Vista has a preliminary support,
with some features disabled.
- Portable. WinPcap is completely compatible with
libpcap. This means that you can use it to port your existing
Unix or Linux tools to Windows. This also means that your
Windows applications will be easily portable to Unix.
- Well documented. The
WinPcap manual documents
the API and the internals in an easy-to-follow hyperlinked
manner. The documentation includes a tutorial that takes you
step-by-step through all of the features of WinPcap.
- Commercially Supported: Are you interested in
professional WinPcap support? Do you want a phone number to call
when something goes wrong? Do you need help in developing your
low-level network code?
CACE Technologies can
help you!
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