system interface for user-level packet capture libpcap (Packet CAPture) provides a portable framework for low-level network monitoring. Applications include network statistics collection, security monitoring, network debugging, etc. Since almost every system vendor provides a different interface for packet capture, and since there are several tools that require this functionality, we've created this system-independent API to ease in porting and to alleviate the need for several system-dependent packet capture modules in each application.