System Preferences - Security & Privacy cannot be opened

Question

System Preferences - Security & Privacy cannot be opened

A click on "Security & Privacy" in "System Preferences" results in a spinning beach ball after a couple of seconds. Activity monitor shows that the following processes/applications are non-responsive:

System Preferences
universalAccessAuthWarn
com.apple.preferences.security.remoteservice

I noticed a similar behavior if I try to copy new version of an application (Filezilla) to the Applications folder. Activity monitor shows that "universalAccessAuthWarn" is non-responsive.

I tried the following suggestions I found without any success:

Opening System Preferences in safe mode
Opening System Preferences with a new user account with admin rights
Reinstalled macOS via Recovery

Any idea before I set up my Mac from scratch?

MacBook Pro 15″, macOS 11.1

Posted on Jan 11, 2021 11:07 AM

Reply

Answer 1

CarlAVII

Community Specialist

Jan 13, 2021 11:37 AM in response to ClimbingRocks

Greetings, ClimbingRocks!

Thanks for reaching out to the Apple Support Communities! it sound sluice you're having an issue opening the security preferences in System Preferences on your Mac. Let's start by taking a look at this article with steps to follow for How to use safe mode on your Mac. This will perform checks and stop certain software from starting up automatically. Once you are in safe mode, test to see if you have the same issue.

We also suggest follow thing these steps to Set up users, guests, and groups on Mac and create a test user to see if the issue is user specific or system wide.

Let us know the results and have a great day!

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Answer 2

Jan 13, 2021 12:40 PM in response to CarlAVII

Hello CarlAVII,

Thank you for your quick response. I tested the two possible solutions you mentioned:

Started in safe mode and opened "Security & Privacy" --> same result as before (spinning beach ball)
Created a guest user and an admin user, restarted the system, logged in and opened "Security & Privacy" --> same result as before

The issue seems to be system wide. As I mentioned in my first post, reinstalling macOS from Recovery also did not solve the problem.

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Answer 3

chuck_3rd

Community Specialist

Jan 13, 2021 2:54 PM in response to ClimbingRocks

Thanks for letting us know the results, ClimbingRocks!

Since the issue is still going on, we would recommend reaching out to Apple directly by checking out this link to Get Support and they will be more than happy to proceed with additional steps.

Cheers!

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Answer 4

sz1292

Level 1

14 points

Jan 28, 2021 11:52 AM in response to ClimbingRocks

Hi,

Did you solve this? This issue is really frustrating with little to no help on this.

And the only option seems to be factory rest and setup again.

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Answer 5

Jan 30, 2021 4:33 AM in response to sz1292

I tried every possible solution I found, but the issue still exists. I will wait for the next service release for Big Sur before I start setting up my Mac from scratch.

Reply

Answer 6

sz1292

Level 1

14 points

Feb 17, 2021 6:10 PM in response to ClimbingRocks

I did a factory reset and set up my Mac from scratch. Everything is back to normal. I guess that is the only solution that seems to solve.

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System Preferences - Security & Privacy cannot be opened

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