[wila]

I had to blink twice last time when I installed Sonoma on a new partition that I did not have to provide a wifi password. This appears to confirm that. While I can understand that some people would appreciate this, I'm not exactly chuffed by a fresh install silently grabbing passwords from an old install.

[LeoPanthera]

That is not related. Mac computers store the last successful wifi credentials in in the EFI, and use them to give macOS Recovery internet access.

[38]

That is fucking terrifying.

[shuckles]

Your laptop storing a Wifi credential locally is terrifying?

[baby_souffle]

I think it’s plain text? Unless recovery environment has a symmetrical encryption scheme and it can decrypt the cypher text stored in nvram?

[adamomada]

I just checked nvram -p

It has the SSID in plaintext in current-network and preferred-network, not the passphrase. I’m not sure how it’s obfuscated or encrypted but it is not plaintext

[38]

its storing it on the god damn motherboard, not a flashdrive or something

[spaceguillotine]

if you have an iPhone, iPad or any other logged in device with the wifi password it will auto grab it from that device without you doing anything.

[Nextgrid]

I believe this is just iCloud Keychain in action.

The other commenter is correct - the last (few?) Wi-Fi passwords are stored in NVRAM so that the recovery environment can connect to the network more conveniently.

[wilg]

How would it have synced the wifi password from iCloud without the wifi password one wonders?