How to find my WEP key or WPA key

I'll try and keep this short and sweet rather than having a long introduction. Scroll down to either: "Retrieving a wireless key thats stored on my computer" or "Retrieving a wireless key that isn't stored on my computer" if you want to get straight down to buisiness.

First of all if you're looking for your wireless key you are probably looking for either a WEP key or a WPA key. If the key is already stored on your own computer it doesn't matter which it is, if not it does. The reason is that WEP and WPA are two different encryption systems both used for encrypting wireless networks. WEP was originally introduced in 1997, but it soon became clear that the the encryption suffered from a problem where after sending 5000 packets of data, there was a 50% probability that a certain piece of data would be repeated in clear view of any attacker. Essentially what this means is that after sending 5000 packets of data (a good wireless card such as the alfa awus036h can do this in two or three minutes) you have a 50% chance of being able to break the wireless key. If the attack fails, an attacker can simply wait another few minutes to have had a 75% chance of cracking the key and so on. Because of this, WEP was superseded by WPA which doesn't suffer from this flaw.

What this means to most people is simple: don't use WEP key encryption! Use WPA. From casual surveys I've noticed that around 40% of people use WEP and about 40% use WPA. The other 20% are commerical custom implementations.

The easiest way is to download a copy of Wireless Key View, which will instantly show all stored WEP passwords. If you dont want to download anything, you can also open up regedit (either from Start -> Run -> regedit or C:\windows\regedit.exe) and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WZCSVC\Parameters\Interfaces\

If you can't see your password stored here (such as after a reinstall) have a look below

If you can't see you're WEP key with the above tool or registry position, things get a little trickier. At this point its far easier to try and reinstall your wireless key. Try navigating in your internet browser to either http://192.168.0.1, http://192.0.0.1, http://192.0.0.2 or http://192.0.0.3 to see if your router can be accessed. Also try looking in the manual of your router for more information, or unplugging or removing the battery from your router.

If all this fails there is one last option, if you use WEP encryption. To see if you are using this try viewing the wireless networks in your area, either with the standard Windows Wireless Zero Tool (right click the little computer with waves at the bottom right of your screen and press "View available networks" or whatever tool you use to connect). You should be able to see the encryption mechanism listed next to the network name, such as WEP, WPA or TKIP. If the encryption is WEP then you are using a weak encryption mechanism that can be broken - change it as soon as you can!

If you need to get this WEP key, there is a tool called aircrack-ng that can do it for you. However, it isn't for novices. It runs on the Linux operating system, which means that if you run Windows you will need to install VMWare then run the VMWare image to run the aircrack-ng software. A good tutorial on how to do this is here.