Cisco Type 7 Password Decoder

Type 7 passwords as used by Cisco IOS are obfuscated rather than encrypted. This is because there are many situations where the router itself needs to know the original password, such as when authenticating using CHAP or WEP. They are hidden to stop someone just peering over your shoulder at a router configuration and seeing passwords, but you can convert back to the unencrypted form if you need to. The code is Javascript, so this doesn’t send the password over the internet. (Of course, if you’re paranoid you should not take my word for it and should inspect the page itself, or run it offline)

In general, if you don’t need the router to know the password and only let people log in locally using it via telnet or ideally ssh you can use secret instead, i.e. username fred secret bloggs and enable secret ILikeCheese.

The original Perl code on which this is based is available here.