How to Find a Network Security Key?

Let’s now look at the methods to find the network security keys in different devices such as Linux, Windows, Android, etc. 

On Windows

Open the Control Panel and change the icon view to Large icons. Here you will see “Network and Sharing Center,” so click and open it:

In the Network and Sharing Center option, click on the Wi-Fi connection to open the Wi-Fi Status:

In the pop-up window of Wi-Fi Status, you will see the Wireless Properties, so click and open it: 

Click on the Security pane, and you will see the details about your Wi-Fi. Now, click on the Show characters to display the password: 

On Linux

You can check the network security key from the terminal in Linux. First, please run the cd command to make the system.connections as the current directory of the terminal: 

cd /etc/NetworkManager/system-connections/

Now, run the ls command to check the files of the system-connections directory: 

Here, you will get the file that contains all the information about the wireless connection, so you can display it through the cat command: 

sudo cat <Wi-Fi NAME>

As you can see in the above image, the psk contains the network security key of the connected Wi-Fi. 

Note: We are using Rocky Linux for this process, but you can run the above commands in any other Linux distribution.  

If you ever come across the Wi-Fi settings, you have probably heard of the network security key. This security key is nothing but another name for the Wi-Fi password. These security keys consist of strings or codes of characters that are used to connect the devices to the wireless network.

However, many users don’t know about the network security key and end up getting errors while finding it. So in this guide, we will give you complete details about a network security key and the methods to find it.