How to Find Saved Wi-Fi Passwords on Windows or MacOS
Riddle to me: you are somewhere and need to connect to a Wi-Fi network with a new device. You realize that you have a Wi-Fi password saved on your laptop, but not on the device you want to connect to. And you are either too lazy to ask for the password again, or you have no way of getting it in your current state.
What are you doing? Light. Get out your laptop and watch it. Here’s how:
Window
To find your saved Wi-Fi password, you have several options. First , you can open a command prompt and enter this somewhat tricky line:
netsh wlan show profile [NAME OF YOUR WIFI NETWORK] key=clear
You will want to replace the [NAME OF YOUR WIFI NETWORK] part with the name of whatever SSID you connect to. When you do this and press Enter, you will see the password for the specified Wi-Fi network in the Key Content list in the Security Settings field – this should be pretty obvious.
If you want to try another method, you can find out your passwords through the Windows 10 settings app. Launch it, click Network and Internet , scroll down a bit and click Network and Sharing Center , click the blue Wi-Fi link next to the “Connections:” field, click “Wireless Properties”, click the button On the “Security” tab, select “Show Symbols.”
There are other utilities that you can use to try to get passwords even easier, but I must point out that Windows Defender may not like them very much. At least that was the case when I tried to download Nirsoft’s WirelessKeyView – a harmless program of course, but one that makes Windows Defender anxious when it finishes transferring to your system.
Mac
In macOS, finding the saved Wi-Fi password is very easy. First , you can open Terminal and enter the following:
security find-generic-password -wa [NAME OF YOUR WIFI NETWORK]
Same as before: replace [YOUR WIFI NETWORK NAME] with exactly what is written. You will then need to authenticate to your system as an administrator, but once you have done that, the password for whatever Wi-Fi network you entered should appear in Terminal.
You can also just dig around in Keychain Access – specifically the Keychain Access application – to find your saved password. Launch the app and click on System Keychain in the upper left corner. Find the Wi-Fi network you want to search and double-click on it.
When you do this, you will see a window that looks like this. To do this, click “Show password” – of course, after authentication.