Libpcap, a portable C/C++ library for network traffic capture. Provides a common interface across various OS-specific backends like BPF, packet filter, netfilter, and NPF.
Libpcap was originally developed by the tcpdump developers in the Network Research Group at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. The low-level packet capture, capture file reading, and capture file writing code of tcpdump was extracted and made into a library, with which tcpdump was linked.
