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brianmowrey

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Oct 5, 2020
419
133
Puzzle: Formerly working 2012 13” MBP i7 running Mojave at first, now Catalina, totally unable to keychain after last week’s security update, though for all I know the problem predated the update. Was not fixed after Oct 3 supplemental update.

I have secure-erased both drives (HD and SSD) and reinstalled both Mojave and Catalina on both drives multiple times, reset SMC and P/NVRAM, and the keychain corruption returns the moment a new user is created (skipping iCloud login). ALL passwords show as garbled strings of text in Show Password. Keys (such as iMessage) duplicate during every user login due to apparent ds errors in the library. Logging into iCloud (on my test iCloud, because I’m treating my main account as potentially poison) creates an explosion of broken tokens in Keychain. System keychain, bogglingly, works fine - wifi passwords do not get garbled!

Ok, it’s just a bug between the newest update and my i7: Nope. The issue replicates after clean-reinstalling to a bootable drive of Mojave from the App Store that predates the security update, and clean-reinstalling to a bootable drive of El Capitan!

All of this replicates without any 3rd party software or peripherals - like I said, the login keychain is broken the very moment a clean user is created. However, on several attempts after reproducing the issue, I have then downloaded Steam App to see what happens. I get a “connection error” even though SteamGuard sends a code to my email, so the password is reaching their server. Very bizarre and possibly irrelevant, but throwing it in. Everything else works fine as far as I can tell.

Only thing I haven’t been able to test is a new drive. Don’t have one atm. But if it is my drives, or my machine for that matter, it seems crazy that I have reinstalled successfully ten times in a row, and that System keychain is hunky-dory. Shouldn’t something else not work besides login keychain??

I’m at a loss for where this sequence suggests the problem is. I want to figure it out!

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