WinPcap allows applications to capture and transmit network packets and 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 comes with Remote Capture capabilities.This requires a remote daemon (called rpcapd) which performs the capture and sends data back and a local client that sends the appropriate commands and receives the captured data.

“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. 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. This library also contains the Windows version of the well known libpcap Unix API. WinPcap extends the standard WinPcap code in such a way that all WinPcap-based tools can expoit remote capture capabilities. For instance, the capabillity to interact with a remote daemon are added to the client software without any explicit modification to it. Vice versa, the remote daemon must be explicitely installed (and configured) on the remote machine.”