Comparing different capture engines
To effectively capture and analyze traffic, there must be a way to gather the raw traffic from the network before being processed by the OS. A Packet Capture (PCAP) engine provides an API to capture traffic. Wireshark uses one of several capture engines, such as libpcap, WinPCap, and Npcap. Let's begin with outlining libpcap.
Understanding libpcap
Libpcap is a capture engine that was originally developed for a Unix-like OS. Libpcap is incorporated into tcpdump, Snort, and other packet analyzers to grab packets as they come off the network interface.
Wireshark and tshark work with libpcap and generate pcapng files by default. Libpcap and tcpdump are developed and maintained at http://www.tcpdump.org/. In the late 1990s, a version of libpcap was adapted for Windows called WinPcap, as we'll discuss next.
Examining WinPcap
WinPcap is a capture engine that uses drivers...
