[Winpcap-users] Vista monitor mode support for 802.11

[Gianluca Varenni]

At the moment there are no current plans to support native WiFi in WinPcap, although I've definitely been thinking about it. The main problem in supporting it is that it's not trivial, it basically requires to rewrite all the kernel module of WinPcap in order to be an NDIS6 filter driver (and as consequence, a lot of the installation code). I've actually experimented with it and read some documentation, with this output:

- not all the wireless cards support the native wifi monitor mode. vista supports both the "legacy" wireless drivers (i.e. the ones that also work on 2000/XP) as well as native WiFi drivers. Only the latter ones *can* support monitor mode. 
- even when they support monitor mode, I've seen native wifi drivers that do not provide the original wireless frames. If you are only interested in the L3 information, that's ok. But if you are interested in the strictly wireless related information (e.g. 802.11 control/management frames), that could be a problem. For example, I've seen 802.11n native WiFi drivers that strip all the 802.11N related information from the frames.
- transmitting on adapters in monitor mode should be possible, but not documented (and probably not supported by MS).

Hope this clarifies the situation.

Have a nice day
GV


  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Joshua (Shiwei) Zhao 
  To: winpcap-users at winpcap.org 
  Sent: Monday, March 30, 2009 11:31 AM
  Subject: [Winpcap-users] Vista monitor mode support for 802.11


  Hi,
  I'm wondering whether winpcap plans to or already support the native WiFi monitor mode on Vista. If so what's the status, and if not what's the difficulty there?

  Many thanks,
  Joshua



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