Where Are Wireless Passwords Stored on Mac OS X?

Question

After the Snow Leopard update I can't connect to my home wifi router.

I removed it from Network Preferences and from Keychain but when I reconnect it will not ask me for the password.

All other wireless networks that I had configured previous to the update still work and all other computers work with my home router (mine did before the update).

I want to find the file where those password are stored to check its permissions or remove it and have the computer ask me for the password again to hopefully fix the issue.

Solution 1

By default, Keychain Access shows the login keychain. If the sidebar does not show any other keychains to choose from, then hit Command-K (menu View » Show Keychains) to see more choices.

On my Mac, both the login keychain and the system keychain show the same AirPort Network password, though the latter is a few years older. The first seems to be used by name and the latter by MAC-address. When looking at the Access Control to see which application can access the passphrase, then one sees some differences as well. But for another Wifi network I only have an entry in the login keychain. (Maybe the system keychain was used in previous versions of Mac OS X, but is still used if no entry in login is found?) I guess deleting all that matches indeed seems the best thing to do.

(As a side note: when one has mounted some network drive with limited credentials, and one wants to change that credentials even when the old ones are still valid, then one also needs to search in the system keychain, not in the login keychain.)

Solution 2

Check in Keychain. All the systems passwords should be there. I know it's not what you want to hear, but I doubt the passwords are stored anywhere else; that's the purpose of the Keychain. I haven't heard of any replacement for it being used in Snow Leopard.

Comments

[jvanderh]

It seems that the password was both in the Login Keychain as well as in the System Keychain. I've removed it from both and now it asks for the password at the office. I will see if this fixes the problem at home tonight. Thanks all.

[jvanderh]

Yes, this issue was cause by the snow leopard upgrade. After removing the access point password from both System and Login keychains the system asked for the password again and it worked correctly. Thanks.

[thSoft]

In Lion, I can confirm the passwords are there.