This has been a thing for quite a while with Comcast. It is also available to a customer service rep. It is retrieved from the Gateway via SNMP if I'm not mistaken. Customer service reps can also reset your wireless password either to a default or a specific one of yours or their choosing if necessary.

This is something to remember with cable modems and especially gateways. As long as it is connected to their Network it is practically thiers from a configurations standpoint, they are in complete control of the device and can get any information they need or want from said device.

I'm not saying they are doing anything nefarious or packet capping the local network or anything of that nature that is a little on the tin foil hat side for me personally, but you should always consider that any information available to a cable modem Gateway or plain cable modem is available to the ISP.

As many have recommended in the past always get a separate router and a plane modem.



Brandon Jackson

On Tue, Apr 23, 2019, 19:47 Töma Gavrichenkov <ximaera@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi NANOG,

Here's an issue raised today:
https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/207895/how-does-comcast-know-my-wifi-password

Apparently there's a concern with customers that their seemingly
private passphrases, entered in their own boxes, are being shared with
the upstream ISP without an explicit customer consent, and are kept in
the ISP database for an unspecified period of time. Is it there by
design?

if so, then maybe some tweaks are necessary?

--
Töma