How to capture a beacon frame from WLAN in windows?

Question

I am using native Wifi api on Windows to programmatically do a few tasks with WLANs. However, my problem is it exposes limited set of functions. I would like to access certain fields of a beacon frame that provides Access Point load, airtime and so on. Which are the tools that can be used to do this?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

I would take a look at winpcap. It is able to capture 802.11 frames. However, it is probable in windows that the chipset driver does not allow setting the WLAN to monitor mode. If this is the case then winpcap might not be able to get the necessary information about beacon frames.

There is also a commercial offering, airpcap, which seems to come bundled with drivers and hardware that allows to do full-scale wifi monitoring in windows.

Answer 2

There is one way to capture WiFi packets under Windows with Wireshark. You have to install Acrylic WiFi software

Acrylic WiFi is a WiFi sniffer for windows that installs an NDIS driver that captures wlan packets in monitor mode and also adds support to wireshark and Cain & Abel to capture WiFi packets.

Once Acrylic is installed you have to start Acrylic, wireshark or Cain as Administrator and select your NDIS WiFi interface.

Answer 3

In Windows Vista or later you can use Npcap that "support raw 802.11 traffic". Npcap is an update of WinPcap using NDIS 6 Light-Weight Filter (LWF).

https://wiki.wireshark.org/CaptureSetup/WLAN#Starting_from_Windows_Vista:_Npcap