Cisco ASA – View pre-shared keys in plain text

Cisco ASA – View pre-shared keys in plain text

As engineers, we don’t always document things as well as we should OR someone you work with is always “too busy” to document their work. This little trick will show you how to recover pre-shared keys on a Cisco Pix or ASA firewall.



Normally, you use the ‘show run’ command to view the running configuration. Pre-shared keys are marked with an asterisk (*). To view the password unencrypted, type ‘more system:running-config’. This will display the full configuration with unencrypted passwords.