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How to recover wifi passwords?

I'm migrating from an old Mac computer to a shiny new MacBook Pro and want to be able to join my brother's network, except we don't remember the password! But my old computer can connect. Is there any way to dredge up that password from Mac OS X so I can enter it anew? I do have Leopard running on both systems...


Dave's Answer:

Until recently, I would have said "no, it's stored in an encrypted fashion", but in fact I was poking around on my Mac a while back and found that, yes, you can indeed recover ostensibly hidden password information from wifi networks on your Mac.

Here's how ya do it in Leopard...

Open up Apple --> System Preferences... --> Network, and click on "Airport" then "Advanced...":

Mac OS X Leopard: Network: Advanced

Once you click on that, you'll now see a list of all the networks to which you've connected:

Mac OS X Leopard: Network: Advanced: Wifi 802.11b

I'll show you the password to "Aerie" here. It's easy, too: double-click on the network name then click on "Show password" and, voila! There it is:

Mac OS X Leopard: Network: Advanced: Show Password

There is a nuance to this, however. Not exactly sure why, but sometimes you click on "Show password" and it shows you asterisks, while other times it'll show you the password, as demonstrated. Ah well, it's better than nothing, right?

Hope that helps you out!



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