macos – Why is my Catalina set up throwing up errors about SecurityAgent / login keychain in a single day, and displaying a gray lock display screen?


It is a barely troublesome situation to explain exactly however I am going to do my finest. About six weeks in the past, my set up of Catalina (10.15.7, MacBook Professional 13″ 2020 / MacBookPro16,2) began to exhibit some unusual behaviour when left operating in a single day (or presumably: when left operating unattended for a number of hours).

Typically, however in no way each day, I am going to return to the machine within the morning and wake the display screen to see a gray lock display screen (no background picture) and a immediate that may usually solely settle for my password (i.e. not Contact ID). Upon unlocking the machine I am going to see a collection of errors and password prompts, which appear to be caught in a loop (or perhaps there are simply sufficient of them queued up that it looks as if a loop). These messages embody:

Unapproved caller. SecurityAgent might solely be invoked by Apple software program
---
Unrecoverable error. SecurityAgent was unable to create requested mechanism builtin:unlock-keychain.
---
accountsd needs to make use of the “login” keychain. Please enter the keychain password.
---
callservicesd needs to make use of the “login” keychain. Please enter the keychain password.
---
identityservicesd needs to make use of the “login” keychain. Please enter the keychain password.
---
CallHistorySyncHelper needs to make use of the “login” keychain. Please enter the keychain password.
---
assistantd needs to make use of the “login” keychain. Please enter the keychain password.
---
CommCenter needs to make use of the “login” keychain. Please enter the keychain password.

The system will give the looks of being usable however is not actually. Signs embody:

  • Finder and Dock repeatedly restarting
  • Typically unable to work together with menubar, e.g. to close down
  • Inconsistent capability to tab between apps and work together with or stop them
  • Unable to start out new apps from Dock or menubar shortcuts (icons simply bounce for some time)

Thus far I’ve by no means been capable of cleanly shut down the machine on this state and have needed to energy it off utilizing the Contact ID / energy button.

When booting again up, every part appears effective besides generally Contact ID preferences have been reset (i.e. I’ve to enrol my finger once more) and on one event my saved Bluetooth units, apart from mouse and keyboard, have been deleted. For what it is price, it does appear that if I “catch” the issue shortly sufficient, e.g. returning to the machine late at evening, the injury is extra restricted and Contact ID will not be at all times reset, nevertheless the opposite points stay. I’ve additionally tried placing the machine into standby in a single day by closing the lid, quite than leaving it operating, however at the very least as soon as the problem has nonetheless occurred (presumably the machine is waking up in some unspecified time in the future in a single day to do one thing).

I am a bit stumped as to how one can diagnose this. My hunch is that it is one thing to do with the system one way or the other dropping entry to Keychain – based mostly on mentions within the error messages above. I did have iCloud Keychain enabled beforehand, however disabled it a few weeks in the past, and the problem has occurred at the very least as soon as since then.

A solution to one other query mentions Keychain permissions – these are mine, in case they’re related:

# /Library/Keychains:
0 drwxr-xr-x   9 root  wheel             288B  9 Feb 08:07 Keychains

# /Library/Keychains/System.keychain
248 -rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel   120K  7 Jan 13:16 /Library/Keychains/System.keychain

# ~/Library/Keychains/ [with redactions]
whole 928
  0 drwx--x--x   7 james  employees   224B 14 Feb 10:07 .
  0 drwx------@ 85 james  employees   2.7K 10 Feb 12:22 ..
  0 -r--r--r--   1 james  employees     0B  7 Dec  2020 .XXXXXXXXXX
  0 -r--------   1 james  employees     0B  7 Dec  2020 .XXXXXXXXXX
  0 drwx------  11 james  employees   352B 14 Feb 09:06 XXXXXXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXX
880 -rw-r--r--@  1 james  employees   439K 14 Feb 10:07 login.keychain-db
 48 -rw-------   1 james  employees    23K 14 Feb 09:41 metadata.keychain-db

Any gentle that anybody would possibly have the ability to shed on this might be a lot appreciated! I’ve a TODO checklist merchandise to improve to Huge Sur, at which stage this would possibly turn out to be moot, however till then I would like to know it higher and keep away from having to do these forced-shutdowns every so often.

Thanks for studying and if I can present any extra data or knowledge please ask.

Related Articles

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here

Latest Articles