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Monday, November 26, 2012

How to view saved wifi passwords in Android

The main location for the password file is (note that it may vary depending on your device):

/data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf

And the format is:

network={
ssid="[SSID Name]"
psk="[WPA passphrase]"
key_mgmt=[Encryption type]
priority=[XX]
}


I will provide two ways of viewing the password.

Method 1 - UI
1- Download a root browser if you don't have one. I used Root Browser Lite
2- Browse to the file location given above
3- Check how many bytes the file has... if it has 0 this method will not work
4- Click open the file with a text editor

Method 2 - Terminal
1- Open the terminal application
2- Change into root with 'su' and then cat the 'wpa_supplicant' file

su
cat /data/misc/wifi/wpa_supplicant.conf

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

Note: you must have a rooted android phone for this to work.

Anonymous said...

Thanks. The command line method worked like a charm.

Chris Schryer said...

I have a gal Tab 10 (ver 1), rooted, and I have 11 networks configured. Wpa_supplicant.conf is not in /data/misc/wifi (the data directory is empty). The file is in system/etc/wifi, and it has header information but nothing network specific. Any ideas?

Victor said...

Hi Chris,

I'm not familiar with the GT 10, but you might want to try an application like this one:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ryanamaral.wifi.passwords

Either way, I would love to hear back if you find a solution.

Cheers,
Vic.

Anonymous said...

The app you yold about for Chris, well worked for me. But where did this app retrieve these passwords?

I just wanted to see it in internal storage but the directory is empty still.

Paulina said...

I still don't get how this works ?

Anonymous said...

mine is encrypted... how to decrypt it?

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for sharing this :-) The first method worked great for me.

Anonymous said...

It worked.... Perfect... Thanks...!!!

Anonymous said...

TNX good man . u r my favorit.

Unknown said...

Sir, First method did not help me so i used second method. I used Terminal emulator and put those commands. Now where can I find the wifi passwords???

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Unknown said...

How to root?