Download Npcap 1.50

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, Nessus, and Wireshark. The Npcap development team released version 1.00 last year and now update it with 1.50 as the version number. The list of changes to it looks like this:

Npcap 1.50

• Fixed #513 which prevented Npcap 1.40 from installing.
• Npcap can now be installed on Windows 10 for ARM64 devices. Both ARM64 and x86 DLLs will be installed, allowing existing x86 applications such as Nmap or Wireshark to run without modification.
• Npcap SDK 1.10 release coincides with this release, providing updated documentation and libs for ARM64.
• Npcap code now passes Microsoft’s Static Driver Verifier for NDIS drivers and Visual Studio’s Code Analysis “AllRules” ruleset. A couple of minor and extremely-improbable bugs were fixed in addition to general code cleanup and annotation.
• On Windows 8 and 8.1, the Npcap driver has been updated to NDIS 6.30, supporting network stack improvements like RSC and QoS. Windows 10 still uses NDIS 6.50 and Windows 7 uses NDIS 6.20.
• Npcap is no longer distributed with SHA-1 digital signatures. Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 will require KB4474419 in order to install Npcap. All other platforms support SHA-2 digital signatures by default.
• Streamlined loopback packet injection to avoid using Winsock Kernel (WSK) sockets. This removes a significant amount of complexity and overhead.
• Due to Microsoft’s deprecation of cross-signed root certificates for kernel-mode code signing, Npcap 1.40 may not install correctly on Windows versions prior to Windows 10. Our testing did not show any issues, but users who experience installation failures may use the /prior_driver =yes installation option to install the Npcap 1.31 driver instead, which has no such issues.
• The “npcapwatchdog” scheduled task, which ensures the Npcap driver service is configured to start at boot, is now installed with a description when possible (Windows 7 does not support creating scheduled tasks via PowerShell). Fixes #498.
• All PowerShell scripts installed or used during installation are now digitally signed.
• Fix an issue where installation under Citrix Remote Access or other situations would fail with the message “Installer runtime error 255 at 76539962, Could not load SimpleSC.dll”. Fixes #226.
• Ensure driver signature can be validated on systems without Internet access by installing the entire certificate chain, including the chain for the timestamp counter-signature. This should address #233.
• Fix an issue with comparing adapter names retrieved from the Registry. This prevented Npcap 1.31 from being used for SendToRx and other less-used features. Fix #311.
• Npcap driver no longer excludes adapters based on media type, which may allow capture on some devices that were previously unavailable.

Npcap 1.40

• This release was retracted due to installer issues. See #513.

Npcap 1.31

• Fix a bug with the non-default legacy loopback capture support that caused all requests to open a capture handle to open the loopback capture instead. It is recommended to not select “Legacy loopback support” at installation unless you know your application relies on it. Fixes #302.
• For Windows 10 and Server 2016 and later, restore the ability to capture traffic on VMware VMnet interfaces such as the host-only and NAT virtual networks. This will be restored for other supported Windows versions in a later release. Fix #304.