Extracting WiFi Passwords - SOLVED AT LAST!

On 2024-11-09 00:08, Java Jive wrote:

 There is a command ...
   <path>\adb backup
... which creates a backup of the phone or tablet on your computer. However, the backup so created, called backup.ab, is a unique tar file format that almost nothing else can read as is, though there are neat workarounds as long as it is not encrypted; however, because my tablet is encrypted, so is the backup, which means that the simple workarounds don't work.
 A whole Perl upgrade later, where the biggest problem was actually uninstalling the previous version, to run a Perl script to extract the contents resulted only in a message that it couldn't do anything with this version 4, a version later than that for which it was written.
 A whole Java upgrade later, where again the biggest problem was uninstalling the previous JDK and JRE, finally extracted it, but it seems to contain nothing useful that was not available already simply by connecting the phone to the PC in the normal way.

Actually they were there all along, which shows just how useless is Windows Search, by contrast Textpad's Find in Files option found them.
So, the full procedure is:
1.    <path>\adb backup
... creates backup.ab in the current directory
2.    Install or update to the latest Java Runtime Environment, currently 1.8.0_431:
https://www.java.com/en/download/help/download_options.html
3.    Download Nelenkov's abe*.jar file:
https://github.com/nelenkov/android-backup-extractor
https://github.com/nelenkov/android-backup-extractor/releases/download/latest/abe-3e9a273.jar
Give the command (without the square brackets around the password, they are merely a convention signifying that it is an optional parameter):
java -jar <path>\abe-3e9a273.jar unpack <path>\backup.ab <path>\backup.tar [password]
The resulting tar file can be extracted by 7-zip.  Search the extracted files' contents for an SSID known to be on the device, mine were in:
\apps\com.android.providers.settings\d_f\flattened-data
--
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