June 6th, 2023

How can I make WiFi passwords per-user rather than per-system?

Raymond Chen
Raymond Chen

By default, newly-created wireless networking profiles are made visible to all users. I’m guessing that the idea is that if you connect to a Wi-Fi network, you are setting it up for the entire machine. That way, other users on the same computer can use the same wireless network.

If you don’t like this, you can change the allow­Everyone­To­Create­All­User­Profiles group policy setting to false. When set to false, only users with wlan_secure_add_user_all_user_profiles permission can create system-wide profiles. That permission is granted by default to Administrators, but you can customize that by calling Wlan­Set­Security­Settings with your custom access list.

Bonus chatter: Note that being in the all users profile means that anyone can see the password. My guess is that this is the main reason for setting allow­Everyone­To­Create­All­User­Profiles to false.

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Old New Thing
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Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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  • Robert Sharp

    The use case might be if you had different networks in your house for parents and kids. That was you can disable Internet for the kid SSID without affecting parent access, while allowing both to use the same computer.

    • Neil Rashbrook

      Fair enough but that doesn’t absolve those third-party drivers whose profile management apps force per-user profiles on you without additional software installation (or just switching back to the Windows UI, depending on which the owner prefers).

  • Bradley Uffner · Edited

    I may just be tired and reading something wrong, but it doesn’t seem the answer matches question. The answer tells us how to set permission to allow someone to create a per-system profile, but the question is asking how to make a per-user profile.

    • Chris Iverson

      Kind of fair enough, but I think the answer can be inferred by what's written here.

      The standard process for creating profiles creates them system-wide by default.

      Changing the policy setting listed changes the default behavior of the standard process.

      After you've changed the policy setting, then unless you're an Administrator(or you've customized the permission list), following the standard process will create per-user profiles.

      So, to answer the question "how do you make a per-user profile", you just create...

      Read more

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