How to Retrieve WiFi Password on Windows

By  on  

Remembering the WiFi password when on a guest network is never easy. Even worse is when it's no longer posted and someone else is asking you for it. Luckily there's a built in Windows command to recover the password of a given WiFi network.

The Shell Code

Open cmd and execute the following command:

netsh wlan show profile name="David Walsh's Network" key=clear

The result of the command, assuming the network is found, is a long text output with a variety of information about the network. To get the see the password for the network, look under the "Security settings" heading which will look like this:

Security settings
-----------------
    Authentication         : WPA2-Personal
    Cipher                 : CCMP
    Authentication         : WPA2-Personal
    Cipher                 : GCMP
    Security key           : Present
    Key Content            : **THE_PLAIN_TEXT_PASSWORD**

As with any complicated command line format, it's best to create an alias so that you don't need to remember the full string!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    Regular Expressions for the Rest of Us

    Sooner or later you'll run across a regular expression. With their cryptic syntax, confusing documentation and massive learning curve, most developers settle for copying and pasting them from StackOverflow and hoping they work. But what if you could decode regular expressions and harness their power? In...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!