[Winpcap-users] Vista Wireless Architecture

[Guy Harris]

On Jul 28, 2006, at 4:05 PM, Gianluca Varenni wrote:
> native wi-fi support in Vista will *probably* enable to capture on  
> Wireless LANs without some of the current limitations.
That would be nice, but, when I first saw something about Native Wi- 
Fi, I had the same hope, and looked at the stuff Microsoft had on it;  
it wasn't encouraging, as it didn't appear to expose the Native Wi-Fi  
stuff to anything that connects to NDIS (such as the WinPcap driver),  
and it didn't seem to have any standard way of turning monitor mode  
on or off.

I'll see what it was that I looked at (I might have a link, or a copy  
of the documents, on my machine at home), and look at the other stuff  
on the Microsoft site, to see what more I can infer.
> I haven't personally studied too deeply what features will be  
> available to a protocol driver like WinPcap. What I suspect is that  
> in any case at the beginning many Wireless card drivers will still  
> expose the old NDIS miniport interface (ndis 5.1), thus delivering  
> fake 802.3 packets, and will be only later ported to native wifi (=  
> NDIS 6.0?).
That's probably going to be a big part of the problem - ultimately,  
libpcap/WinPcap are at the mercy of driver writers.  Given that a lot  
of Windows driver writers apparently can't even figure out how to  
make promiscuous mode work right on 802.11 (or, worse, think that  
they way they made it work, with no outgoing packets or no packets at  
all being delivered, *is* right), I wouldn't be hopeful about  
anything that Microsoft doesn't require you to do in order to be able  
to put the Windows logo on your driver; I hope Microsoft is *REALLY*  
strict about this and enforces a *lot*.