Use wpa_supplicant without plain text passwords

Question

I'm running gentoo on my laptop, and I'm currently using wpa_supplicant to handle wifi.

My configuration works and I can connect, but it is required to type in the plain text password into the configuration file. This doesn't work if I want to connect to a friend's wifi and they want to type in the password instead of telling me what it is. There's no security with plain text passwords.

How can I make this more secure so that some sort of encrypted password is stored instead of plaintext?

Answer 1

wpa_passphrase [ ssid ] [ passphrase ] generates a WPA PSK from an ASCII passphrase for a SSID. Then store it as

network={
        ssid="your ssid"
        psk=outputfromabove
}