Keychain crashing on launch

[Morac]

I opened the Keychain on my MBA M1 running Ventura and clicked on iCloud Keychain and the app crashed. It now crashes constantly on launch. As such I think there was something bad in the iCloud Keychain file.

How can I resolve this without losing my local only Keychain data?

 

[Morac]

I ended up logging out and back in and went into KeyChain immediately. It opened and the iCloud Keychain loaded, but then keychain crashed a few seconds later. I ran it again and it loaded, but now iCloud Keychain is just blank. There's nothing listed there. As far as I can tell iCloud Keychain is working as I can see Password sync over from my iPhone (and I see using fs_usage that the Keychains folder is being accessed), I just can't see any iCloud Keychain items. I tried logging out and back in and that didn't fix it.

I guess the KeyChain app doesn't like iCloud Keychain.

 

[Slartibart]

you can open the associated crash log from the Console on your Mac to get more information what is happening.

 

[Morac]

I submitted the crash log to Apple. Keychain crashed in CoreFoundation with a SIGABRT, so it seems like a code bug.

On a side note the iCloud Keychain came back. I’m pretty sure the Keychain app has problems reading some iCloud Keychain data. The app is kind of buggy and probably hasn’t been updated in a long time.

 

[Morac]

FYI this still happens on MacOS 26.2 when selecting iCloud. Fortunately there's really no reason to do that now with the Passwords app.

Still if anyone ever finds this thread and gets stuck with keychain crashing on launch after selecting iCloud, you can restore the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keychainaccess file from Time Machine or run the following command from the terminal to load the system keychain as the default instead of the iCloud one:

defaults write com.apple.keychainaccess "Last Selected Keychain" "/Library/Keychains/System.keychain"

You could also probably just delete the ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.keychainaccess file and let keychain recreate it.