WinPcap is a network packet capture library designed for Windows operating systems. Wireshark is a popular packet capturing and security tool. Wireshark developers created the WinPcap in order to tap into the network of Windows systems and capture packets. Recently the development of the WinPcap is stopped with the version of WinPcap 4.1.3.
WinPcap Development Stopped and Do not Supports Windows 10
For 15 years WinPcap was the defacto and standard libpcap library for Windows operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 8. With the release of Windows 10 WinPcap functionality is broken because NDIS 5 was not supported by Windows 10. Another popular project Nmap has emerged and created libpcap library with the NDIS 6 API support which is designed for Windows 10 operating system. Alternatively, you can install Ncap for libpcap functionality on all Windows operating systems especially Windows 10.
Download WinPcap
Winpcap library is provided by the Wireshark developers from the winpcap.org web site. From the following URL, we can land to the download page.
https://www.winpcap.org/install/default.htm
Also, the WinPcap installer can be downloaded from the following URL.
https://www.winpcap.org/install/bin/WinPcap_4_1_3.exe
Install WinPcap From Setup File
We will click on the downloaded installer file named WinPcap_1_3.exe and see the following screen where we have to accept to run with privileged rights. We will, of course, click Yes.
We will see following Welcome Screen about WinPcap installer.
Following screen provides the License Agreement about WinPcap.
We will set installation options on the following screen. It is simply where we will just set the Automatically start the WinPcap driver at boot time option because the WinPcap works as a device driver in order to capture network traffic. Starting it during boot is a very useful configuration.
As WinPcap is a tiny library the installation will take just 2-3 seconds and at the end following screen will be shown.
WinPcap Alternative Npcap
As stated previously WinPcap is currently a dead project and does not support the Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 operating systems because of NDIS 6 API incompatibility. Ncap is the best and compatible alternative to the WinPcap. Npcap provides the same WinPcap API and actively maintained and supported.
WinPcap Alternative Win10Pcap
Win10Pcap is another alternative to the WinPcap but it is less popular. It is a personal project from Daiyuu Nobori from Japan. Simply the WinPcap sources code it turned compatible with the NDIS 6 API. Also, IEEE802.1Q VLAN tag support is added to the Win10Pcap as an extra. Win10Pcap can wor both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows systems where also can work with current Windows operating systems like Windows 7,8,2008,2016 etc. It can be downloaded from the following link.