Big Sur and smart cards

I have been using a YubiKey nano 5 for smart card login to MacOS Catalina for several months. I upgraded to Big Sur yesterday and since then, I've been having intermittent problems.

When I take an action in the GUI that requires root privileges, I get the normal prompt "XXX wants to make changes. Enter your PIN to allow this." However, this dialog gets stuck and the action never completes. After I enter my PIN, the dialog hangs with the buttons and PIN field disabled. If I remove the smart card, the dialog becomes active again and switches to asking for password. If I enter my password, the dialog hangs again. If I insert my YubiKey again, the dialog becomes active and asks for my PIN, but after I provide my PIN, the dialog hangs.

Smart Card login to Mac OS works fine. I have not touched the smart card configuration at all. Smart card PIN at terminal prompts for root privilege seems to work fine. Re-launching Finder does not solve the problem. Rebooting solves the problem for a short time, then it returns.

I'd appreciate any help.

macOS Big Sur

Version 11.0.1

Mac Pro (Late 2013)

Posted on Nov 14, 2020 3:44 PM

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22 replies

Swinx43

Level 1

4 points

Nov 25, 2020 1:19 PM in response to robertfromaldie

I have the exact same issue. At the moment I cannot seem to find any fix for this. It is making Big Sur very frustrating to use.

Nov 27, 2020 7:32 PM in response to mr_drlove

I am still working with Apple Support on this. No resolution yet.

Dec 4, 2020 8:53 AM in response to Swinx43

So, I tested this week. Using openSC CTK did NOT solve the problem, it makes the problem occur less frequently.

Jan 27, 2021 1:28 AM in response to Branden Williams

I also tried to reset the SMC, but it did not solved any of my problems.

Jan 27, 2021 6:35 PM in response to mr_drlove

I did the unpair, smc reset, re-pair, and it still did not work for me. Right now I'm not using Yubikey as a smart card with MacOS Big Sur.

Swinx43

Level 1

4 points

Dec 4, 2020 12:58 AM in response to vready

I have unpaired my Yubikey from my macbook pro and now simply log in with my password. I disabled the Smartcard Pairing notification, which you will receive each time you plug it into the machine, just because it got annoying. The Yubikey still works for any other website or service that you have 2FA set up against.

So far everything has been working well, except for the annoyance of having to type in a password for root and login :)

Dec 10, 2020 2:27 PM in response to mr_drlove

Hi @mr_drlove,

Yes, I really did just disable smart card pairing. I did NOT re-enable. I tried reinstalling MacOS, but that didn't fix the problem, and I needed to get my computer back in working order, so I just deleted the SC pairing.

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Big Sur and smart cards