Transfer WiFi Passwords from "System" keychain to "Local Items" (aka, iCloud) Keychain

[iTim314]

For reasons I am not sure, years of saved WiFi passwords are on my Mac under the System keychain, meaning they are not syncing to my iPhone over iCloud Keychain. I cannot figure out a way to move these items to the Local Items keychain, which is the iCloud Keychain.

• Dragging and dropping doesn't work.
• You cannot export a keychain item unless it's a certificate+key pairing.
• Manually creating a keychain item does not work, as macOS adds an Airport permission to WiFi items that I cannot manually duplicate.

Does anyone know of a way to transfer around 100-150 saved WiFi passwords from one keychain to another?

 

[Apple_Robert]

See if this article is of any help.

How to import and export iCloud Keychain passwords

Want to copy over your passwords or create a backup of them? Learn how to export and import your iCloud Keychain passwords on Mac.

www.idownloadblog.com

 

[iTim314]

Nope. File > Export is grayed out. From my understanding, you can only export a certificate+key combination from a keychain, not a password item.

 

[Apple_Robert]

Nope. File > Export is grayed out. From my understanding, you can only export a certificate+key combination from a keychain, not a password item.

I will keep looking. I think you are going to need to talk to Apple on this or consider creating a new Keychain (after backing up your current one).

 

[iTim314]

The interim solution I have is time consuming, but doable. I'm creating another WLAN using the saved SSID and password stored in the system keychain, removing the password item from the system keychain, then joining the new WLAN. macOS re-creates the password item in the iCloud Keychain and it syncs.

It may be the worst workaround of all time, but a workaround nonetheless.

 

[0128672]

I'm curious how they might have been saved under the System Keychain, but maybe there isn't a way to know that. Are new passwords are being saved in the system keychain too, or only the older ones?

 

[iTim314]

The new passwords are being saved to both the Local Items and the System keychain. The behavior is what you would expect.

I suspect that the problem started when I received my new MacBook Pro (~January 2020). All of the System airport keychain items predate my purchase date, and all Local Item keychain items are post-purchase. I didn't do anything special when migrating; I utilized iCloud where I could, then manually copied over some user folders and some select application settings. But I didn't mass-copy anything in the ~/Library folder that would have included the old keychain. It's a mystery to me.

 

[CoyoteDen]

I am able to do this by right-click, copy the items in System Keychain, then paste in iCloud Keychain. You have to enter an admin user/pass for every item being pasted to read the items from System, but it works! All pasted items will be named "AirPort" but they do contain the saved network names and keys. I rename them back to the network names.

Very useful after a network settings reset on an iOS device removes all Wi-Fi entries from the iCloud Keychain.