The purpose of WinPcap is to give this kind of access to Win32 applications. That is, they need access to the "raw" data on the network without the interposition of protocol processing by the operating system. Sometimes, however, the 'easy way' is not up to the task, since some applications require direct access to packets on the network. 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.) and provides a familiar interface that is similar to the one used to read and write files. Most networking applications access the network through widely used operating system primitives such as sockets. This library also contains the Windows version of the well known libpcap Unix API. WinPcap consists of a driver, that extends the operating system to provide low-level network access, and a library that is used to easily access the low-level network layers. WinPcap is the industry-standard tool for link-layer network access in Windows environments: it allows applications to capture and transmit network packets bypassing the protocol stack, and has additional useful features, including kernel-level packet filtering, a network statistics engine and support for remote packet capture.
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