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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

Top-ranking reply

robertfromaldie Author

Level 1

9 points

Posted on Dec 8, 2020 4:41 PM

OK guys, I think that I solved it for my computer, but the solution sucks. I'm still waiting on Apple support.

What I did was unmap the smart card from my user - yes, I know that this means that I'm not doing smart card auth anymore. But, I haven't gotten the hung login window issue anymore.

Unplug your Yubikey, then from a terminal, type:

sc_auth unpair -u $(whoami)

I did this without su and the command hung, so I did it again under su in a new terminal.

Then I rebooted, been fine ever since.

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Big Sur and smart cards

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