Software update: Npcap 1.10

Previously, on the Windows platform, you had to rely on WinPcap when you wanted to capture or edit network traffic. However, its development was completely discontinued in 2013. Nmap, among others, made use of this packet capture library and these developers then started developing Npcap where several improvements can be found in. For example, recent libpcaps are supported, and it can receive or send loopback traffic. Npcap is used by several networking tools today, such as Nmap and Wireshark. The Npcap development team released version 1.00 last year and updated it last month with 1.10 as the version number. The list of changes to it looks like this:

Npcap 1.10

• Fixed an issue where our upgrade uninstaller would trigger the #1924 BSoD crash when upgrading from Npcap 0.9988 or older to version 0.9996 or greater. Fixes #268.
• Improved handling of large packets when a very small user buffer size is specified, which could lead to stalled captures and dropped packets.
• Fix a packet corruption issue when one capture handle sets a snaplen of exactly 256 bytes and another sets a snaplen of greater than 256 bytes and the packet size exceeds 256 bytes.
• Fix accounting of free space in the kernel buffer so that bugs like the previous one do not cause space to be permanently lost, leading to dropped packets. Instead, use assertions to catch this condition in testing with the debug build.
• Check that the npcap driver service is configured for SYSTEM_START in the npcapwatchdog scheduled task and correct it if necessary. Windows feature updates can modify this value.