Additional Password Security. The following sections provide information about unmasked and masked secret password. Unmasked Secret Password. To provide an additional layer of security, particularly for passwords that cross the network or that are stored on a Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) server, you can use either the enable password or enable secret global configuration commands.. Device(config)#end show running-config Verifiesyourentries. Example: Step5 Device#showrunning-config (Optional)Savesyourentriesinthe configurationfile. copy running-config startup-config Example: Step6 Device#copyrunning-config startup-config Protecting Enable andEnable Secret Passwords withEncryption
Privileged password can be encrypted by using the command "enable secret" instead of "enable password". This command should be set from privileged global configuration mode. Let's see what can we see when we use the command "show running-config". We can see that the password we set has been encrypted, but what about other passwords.. Switch(config)# Note: The switch will not ask you for a password when entering into Privileged EXEC mode (i.e after typing "enable") if it has the default factory configuration. See Step 3 below about setting up a password for the Privileged EXEC mode. STEP2: Set up a hostname for the particular switch to distinguish it in the network.