Forgot Your Wifi Password? Here’s How To Check Wifi Password On Windows And Mac

Whenever you connect your device to wifi there is no need to enter a password every time. You might have noticed that you entered a password for any particular new wifi connection only for the first time, the rest of the time you don’t need to check wifi password and your device remembers it and automatically connects you to the wifi. Commonly, you tend to forget wifi passwords and rack your brain to recall it. The good news is we can apparently extract passwords for all the wifi connections used by your device. This article will walk you through simple methods to check the wifi password in your Windows or Mac machines.

Check WiFi password directly from the router.

Generally, equipment vendors provide a router for setting Wi-Fi connection. Each router, by default, has a unique combination of user id and password. If you have not changed this password and user id while setting up a Wi-Fi connection, you can get this password from the sticker behind the router.

Check wifi password on the Windows platform by following these steps.

There are two ways for knowing password on Windows

1. By checking Wi-Fi network properties.
2. By using the command prompt.

Given below are the detailed steps to get a Wi-Fi password by checking network properties.

Method 1: Check WiFi password in network properties. 

If you are accessing your Wi-Fi through a laptop or PC running on the Windows platform, you can easily retrieve your current Wi-Fi password. You can even recover passwords that were used earlier with other Wi-Fi connections because Windows 10 /8 stores all the connection details every time you connect to the Wi-Fi. To get the password for the Wi-Fi connection in question, follow below given quick steps.

1. Right-click on the wifi-connection icon on the taskbar.
2. Choose ‘Open Network & Internet settings option’.
3. Then search for ‘Network and Sharing Center’ and click on it.
4. Click on the name of the current Wi-Fi connection. It will show you the necessary connection details. 

In the below figure, it is showing details about wifi-connection named “go green” when clicked.

5. Click on the “wireless properties” button.
6. Click on the Security tab from the “Wireless Network Properties” window.
7. Check the checkbox of “Show character.” There it is! The Network Security Key displays the password in the readable format.

In the below case, the password for the “go green 2” wireless connection is displayed.

As discussed earlier, another way of getting a password is through the command prompt, find out detailed steps given below.

Method 2: Check WiFi password using command prompt on Windows 10/8/7

1. Right-click on the Start button and choose “Run.”
2. Type “cmd” in the Run window. The command prompt will be opened.
3. Type the command “netsh wlan show profiles”  in the command prompt: This command will give you the list of user-profiles of all the Wi-Fi networks to which your computer has connected up till now.
4. Now type the command “netsh wlan show profile name=profilename key=clear”: here replace profile name with the user profile name whose password you want to retrieve, and execute it. 
5. Check for Key Content in Security Settings to get the password of the Wi-Fi connection in question.

In the below figure, after typing command “netsh wlan show profile name=iPhone key=clear,” all the essential details of the connection are retrieved, and key content highlights the password of the “iPhone” connection.

The drawback of this method:

No authentication process carried out before displaying a password.

1. If someone tricks you, and you accidentally connect to your Wi-Fi from another’s Laptop or PC, that person can hack your password through command prompt very easily. As those details are readily available, anyone can get your password just by typing one command.
2. To avoid such a threat, you must keep changing the password of your Wi-Fi over a while. 

Here’s how to check the wifi password on Mac

There are two ways to retrieve the Wi-Fi password on Mac. By using the Keychain Access app and another one by using Terminal. Find out detailed steps given below for both the methods.

Method 1: Using Keychain Access app to check WiFi password on Mac:

“Keychain Access app” in Mac stores all the passwords for different applications running on Mac. You must have the System Administrator’s password to access all other passwords. 

Steps to check Wi-Fi password by using Keychain:

1. Use Spotlight Search to open Keychain Access.
2. Click on the System link and then choose the Password option under the Category column.

3. Then look for the Wi-Fi connection name in question and click it.

In the above figure, I want to check the password for Wi-Fi connection “whoami”.

4. Once that connection details open, then click on the “show password” button.
5. The system will ask for the admin’s username and password before showing a password as the authentication process. 
6. Enter your credentials and press “ok.”
7. That’s it! Now password for your network is displayed in a readable format in the box labelled ‘Show password.’ In the below figure password for connection “whoami” is “Imsophorn.”

Method 2: Use Terminal in Mac to check WiFi password:

The Terminal is the built-in app in your Mac, where the command prompt is used to control operations in your Mac.

Steps to get Wi-Fi password using Terminal:

1. Launch Terminal using spotlight search.
2. Type command security find-generic-password -ga WIFI NAME | grep “password:”

Note: Replace WIFI NAME by connection’s name in question.

3. Once the command is entered properly, then you will be prompted for authentication.
4. Enter your credentials.
5. After authentication, the password for the Wi-Fi connection will be displayed right under the command you entered previously.

In the below figure :

The Wi-Fi name is “vivo 1718”.

Command to get the password is security find-generic-password –ga “vivo 1718”.

The above command displays all details of Wi-Fi connection, and in front of the password, you can see the password for vivo 1718 i.e “ranjatar”.

Closing note:

We enlisted two methods for each Windows and Mac to regain your wi-fi password. You no longer have to brood over forgotten passwords of Wi-Fi connection or really have to be tech-savvy to implement these solutions. You can easily carry out the steps introduced in this article to check WiFi passwords. Let us know by your comments if this article helped you.