Recover Your Wireless Connection Passwords in Seconds

Ever had a quest come over your apartment requesting access to your wireless network? Sure you have! Ever forgotten what your actual password was due to its awesome complexity you gave it? Of course! Who actually can remember a 14+ random character password?! Well, if you were prepared, you would have kept a copy of that password somewhere (hopefully in an encrypted location). You could also just log back in to your router and recover the password that way. However, what if a non-techie friend asked you for help recovering their wireless password for their connection at home? Have you ever tried explaining how to log in to a router to a computer illiterate person? Not fun at all. Luckily, there is a special utility that allows you or just about anyone else to easily recover and retrieve all passwords the computer has used to log in to every wireless network in the past (assuming the connection profile wasn’t manually deleted by the user).

Nirsoft’s WirelessKeyView is a simple utility that does one thing and one thing only and that is to help you recover your wireless connection passwords. Not only does it do so for your current or last used connection, it helps recover basically every wireless connection password for every wireless connection you have connected to in the past. One caveat though: those wireless connections must have been managed by the Wireless Zero Configuration service in Windows XP or the WLAN AutoConfig service in Windows Vista and Windows 7. In simpler terms, in order for WirelessKeyView to help recover your passwords, you must have used the Windows built-in wireless manager when connecting to that specific wireless connection. If you used third party utilities to help manage your wireless connections, then the WirelessKeyView utility might not work. Personally, I never had to use any third party utilities to manage my wireless connections. The built-in tools in Windows does an excellent job at doing so.

You can download Nirsoft’s WirelessKeyView from here.The best part about using WirelessKeyView (as with every other self-executables) is that it doesn’t require any type of installation. Just download, extract and run. Simple as that. Immediately, you’ll see a list of all the wireless networks you have connected to in the past. Find the wireless network in question and look under the “Key (Ascii)” column and the password should be right there in plaintext.

If you don’t feel like using WirelessKeyView every time, then what you can do is export the values to a simple text file. Highlight the connections you wish to export and select the Save Selected Items option under the File menu. The resulting file is just a simple text file that can be opened with Notepad or Wordpad.

Some might think of WirelessKeyView as pretty useless because there are other ways to retrieve your own wireless connection’s password. However, that can’t be said when you need to view a password to a connection you have connected to in the past and this utility can do just that should the need actually arise. If you provide tech support for family members or non-tech clients, it’s much easier to give them instructions on how to run WirelessKeyView than to log into their own router. Since WirelessKeyView is a self-executable, you can simply dump the tool onto your thumb drive and access it on just about any Windows computer you use.

WirelessKeyView does not help you crack wireless connection passwords. It can only show you passwords to wireless connections in which you have successfully connected to in the past (assuming you haven’t actually deleted the wireless profile itself).