Keychain and 1password questions

[MrMinor]

Can someone give me a basic rundown of what the Keychain is and how I am supposed to use it?

Also, I use 1password and it requires me to put in my password every time. It gives me the option to remember the PW in the keychain, but when I select that it gives me a serious sounding warning that basically says it is not safe to do it the keychain is not properly secured which by default it is not. How do I secure it so I can safely save my 1password PW?

 

[vishvesh]

Hi,
Keychain is the place where most of the application store login details. If u want to keep it safer then you can encrypt it.

Passwords stored in Keychain can be accessed by the admin of the machine or by the application which wrote data into the keychain.

There are methods which can be used for writing, retrieving and updating passwords.

writing to key chain
OSStatus SecKeychainAddGenericPassword ( SecKeychainRef keychain,
UInt32 serviceNameLength,const char *serviceName,
UInt32 accountNameLength,const char *accountName,
UInt32 passwordLength, const void *passwordData,
SecKeychainItemRef *itemRef
);

retrieving :

OSStatus SecKeychainFindGenericPassword (CFTypeRef keychainOrArray,
UInt32 serviceNameLength, const char *serviceName,
UInt32 accountNameLength, const char *accountName,
UInt32 *passwordLength,void **passwordData,
SecKeychainItemRef *itemRef
);

updating/modifiing

status = SecKeychainItemModifyAttributesAndData (
itemRef, // the item reference
&attributes, // no change to attributes
passwordLength, // length of password
password // pointer to password data
);

regards,
vishvesh

 

[cromac87]

key chain missing osx 10.5

Hi,
forgive me if i am coming in thr wrong place, but i dont know even how to post question here directly.
As you can imagine i am a "dumm" in computer, at least mac
key chain is missing in my imac (15 days old) not in the applications/utilities.
How can I load it ? I found just an update but when installing says not on this HD which confirms key chain missing.
thank you for help