John Fitzgerald
Very Senior Member
A bit off topic question: Why are the passwords stored in a "Guest" network that has been deactivated?Am I correct in assuming here that the part about "encrypting the WPA password in NVRAM" is just speculation even though it's not clearly indicated as such? Or perhaps you meant to say that this is the case for the newer "AX" router models, but not for the older "AC" models. Is this what you mean?
Currently, I don't have access to any "AX" models; but so far, with all the ASUS routers that I do have access to (RT-AC68U, RT-AC86U, RT-AC88U, RT-AC5300, GT-AC5300) I can see that all WPA PSK strings are *not* stored in NVRAM in an encrypted form at all. They're all found in human-readable, plain-text format.
You can check & verify this by typing the following command on your router via an SSH terminal window:
nvram show | grep "_wpa_psk"
My expectation is that once a field has been turned off, the settings are not stored, yet they are there.
As a follow-up, how can one reset the single "guest" network, without factory resetting?