Viewing saved wifi passwords from terminal
Overview
Often at times you want to know the passwords of a particular WiFi connection that you are connected to or of one that you connected in the past.
Where the wifi network details are saved?
The instructions that I am going to write apply to most distributions and the ones which use the network-manager package for managing the networks.
The Wifi networks you have ever connected to are stored in /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections
root@sanganak:/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections# pwd
/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections
This is where all the wifi network details are stored. Lets see some saved networks from my computer.
root@sanganak:/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections# ls -la
total 36
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 23 16:51 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 Aug 15 02:57 ..
-rw------- 1 root root 335 Aug 22 00:45 Aryan
-rw------- 1 root root 338 Aug 18 13:07 GUEST-N
-rw------- 1 root root 345 Aug 23 16:51 TBSWPRO
-rw------- 1 root root 343 Aug 23 10:16 TP-LINK
-rw------- 1 root root 343 Aug 19 22:54 Tenda_3563
-rw------- 1 root root 341 Aug 19 14:25 hotspot2
-rw------- 1 root root 384 Aug 19 22:41 ''$'\340\244\270\340\245\207\340\244\265\340\244\276'
When we connect to any wifi network using the GUI of Network Manager or any command line interface. The network details are stored in this particular path with a new file each time corresponding to the SSID of the network.
You can open any of these files and the network details would be right there.
Lets take a look at the network details of GUEST-N
root@sanganak:/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections# cat GUEST-N
[connection]
id=GUEST-N
uuid=ed2a8866-7a0b-4cb1-96f9-0518ae77806d
type=wifi
permissions=
[wifi]
mac-address=A0:88:B4:E4:C5:64
mac-address-blacklist=
mode=infrastructure
ssid=GUEST-N
[wifi-security]
auth-alg=open
key-mgmt=wpa-psk
psk=esya@2018
[ipv4]
dns-search=
method=auto
[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
dns-search=
method=auto
You can see that the security key is listed in front of the field psk
Lets take a look at more details of another network named Tenda_3563
root@sanganak:/etc/NetworkManager/system-connections# cat Tenda_3563
[connection]
id=Tenda_3563
uuid=6e3fcf66-1a04-4f7b-a931-90881d9ea132
type=wifi
permissions=
[wifi]
mac-address=A0:88:B4:E4:C5:64
mac-address-blacklist=
mode=infrastructure
ssid=Tenda_3563
[wifi-security]
auth-alg=open
key-mgmt=wpa-psk
psk=12345678
[ipv4]
dns-search=
method=auto
[ipv6]
addr-gen-mode=stable-privacy
dns-search=
method=auto
For the network Tenda_3563 the password listed above is 12345678
So now we know the wifi network connection details and where they are stored.