Network Driver Interface Specification

The Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) is an application programming interface (API) for network interface cards (NICs). It was jointly developed by Microsoft and 3Com Corporation and is mostly used in Microsoft Windows. However, the open-source NDISwrapper and Project Evil driver wrapper projects allow many NDIS-compliant NICs to be used with Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD. magnussoft ZETA, a derivative of BeOS, supports a number of NDIS drivers.

The NDIS forms the Logical Link Control (LLC) sublayer, which is the upper sublayer of the OSI data link layer (layer 2). Therefore, the NDIS acts as the interface between the Media Access Control (MAC) sublayer, which is the lower sublayer of the data link layer, and the network layer (layer 3).

The NDIS is a library of functions often referred to as a "wrapper" that hides the underlying complexity of the NIC hardware and serves as a standard interface for level 3 network protocol drivers and hardware level MAC drivers. Another common LLC is the Open Data-Link Interface (ODI).