I can't turn off iCloud keychain

I had an issue signing out of an iCloud account because I couldn't disable iCloud Keychain. I discovered a fairly easy method to reset your iCloud keychain on the computer having issues without having to use any other devices or mess with any iCloud settings.

Navigate to "~/Library/Keychains" (You can copy the path in quotations and use 'Shift+Cmd+G' in an open finder window to go straight to it)

You should see a folder with a long alpha-numerical string for a name, and that's your iCloud Keychain.

You're going to delete this folder and then empty your trash, but there's a trick. The keychain is likely going to be in use by your system which will prevent you from emptying your trash. Just reboot your computer and empty your trash immediately after you login. I had luck emptying my trash before all my startup items finished loading.

Once you do this, restart your computer again. Then go into your iCloud settings in system preferences and try to sign out.

Hope this helps!

The best of luck to you all!

I had the same problem, and these solutions did not work for me:

• Change security code
• Uncheck "AutoFill user names and passwords" in Safari; reboot
• Run first aid repair in Keychain Access
• Turn it on on another Mac first

In the end, I phoned Apple support, and was taken through these steps:

1. Move contents in ~/Library/Keychains/ to some backup location (WARNING: this will remove your passwords from the Keychain, hence the backup)
2. Remove contents of ~/Library/Caches; reboot; empty trash again (since some items can't be deleted before a reboot)
3. Uncheck the Keychain item in the iCloud system preferences.

This did work for me. I gradually restored my existing keychains. I suspect the above also works by retaining the login.keychain, but delete the rest.

You can access the ~/Library folder by selecting the "Go" menu in the finder while you hold down the option/alt key: this will reveal the "Library" folder in your home folder.

Well, I spoke too soon. Although I was able to uncheck Keychain in my iCloud preferences on my iMac (OS X 10.9) by following the steps above, when I rebooted it was checked again and even after following the steps I'm unable to get it to stay unchecked OR sign out of iCloud - due to Keychain remaining active.

I've signed out of iCloud on my MacBook Air and deleted my account completely from my iPhone 4 and iPhone 5s. AFAIK there are no other iCloud services running.

I still cannot get it to uncheck without immediately rechecking itself again and am unable to sign out of iCloud on my iMac...getting this error:

No idea how to proceed.

Reading a numerous sugestions and "solutions" on internet I've tried dozens of options to turn off keychain, and this was my last hope. Nothing! It does not work for me.

Sincerely hope that somebody from Apple will give us instructions how to turn off keychain.

plus, there is no way to sing out from iCloud, noo way!

I finally got mine turned off - it was doing exactly what you described. Here is what I did:

1. Open Safari

2. Choose Safari->Preferences

3. Choose "Passwords"

4. Uncheck "AutoFill user names and passwords"

5. Choose "AutoFill"

6. Uncheck all items

7. Close Preferences

8. Close Safari

9. Reboot

10. Open System Preferences

11. Choose iCloud

12. Select "Sign Out"

Hope it works for you!

I found a solution:

I signed-in to the same iCloud account on another OS X machine (my MBP). I did this as a Primary iCloud account, not a Secondary (because the Keychain service is not available on Secondary iCloud accounts). To expedite things, I deselected all services offered except Keychain. Keychain went to the verification process, which offers an option to either verify via another device signed-in to iCloud, or via an iCloud Security Code and an SMS to my phone, if you have set this up. I elected the latter.

Once iCloud was signed-in and the Keychain service verified and enabled, I then went back to the other OS X machine (my iMac, the machine with the problem) and was able to uncheck Keychain at System Preferences>iCloud, "Delete from Mac" and then sign-out. Yay!

I then went back to my MBP and was able to uncheck Keychain and sign-out of iCloud without a problem, which disproves one theory that the problem is caused by Keychain always needing at least one OS X device signed-in.

I have no idea why this worked, but it seemed to snap Keychain out of its idiot-loop.

🙂

I had the same problem and worked through it with Apple Support for two hours over the course of 3 days. Here is what worked for me.

I. Delete iCloud Authenticators from Your Keychain

1. Open Keychain Access.

2. Select 'Passwords' from the Category area on the bottom left

3. Type 'iCloud' in the search field on the top right.

4. Delete all items that have your iCloud e-mail as the username.

5. Also delete any items that begin with 'IDS'.

II. Delete the Local Device ID from Your Keychain

1. While still in Keychain Access, choose 'All Items' from the Category area.

2. Type 'localdevice' in the search field on the top right.

3. Delete any item that appears.

4. Reboot your Mac.

III. Turn off Keychain Passcode

1. When the system reboots, try to disable iCloud just to see if it works. If not, continue to the next step.

2. Open System Preferences > iCloud.

3. Make sure you have an iOS device or another Mac logged in to iCloud with Keychain set to ON. You will need it for the next steps.

4. Click 'Options' next to Keychain and completely disable the security code so that everything in this dialog box is inactive/grey.

5. On your iOS device or other Mac, disable the same security code feature.

6. On your iOS device, now disable Keychain.

7. On your iOS device, try enabling Keychain again. You should see the option of resetting your Keychain. Reset it!

8. Now, on the troubled Mac, you should find that the Keychain option is disabled so that you can log out of iCloud.

The key in all of this is to reset your iCloud Keychain, but before we do that, we need to delete some of these keychain items that may be causing conflicts and communication failures with iCloud.

Please let me know if this helped you as it helped me.

Best regards

You will need to set up keychain correclty in order to turn it off. So follow the guidelines from http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5813?viewlocale=en_US in order to set up keychain correctly. Includes phone number verification.

Than reset the network settings (go to: settings / general / reset / network settings) -> please keep in mind that the saved wi-fi passwords will be erased, and than go to settings / icloud and turn off the keychain. This should solve the issue. 🙂

Happened to me, I eventually was able to remove it by reseting the iCloud keychain. See below.

OS X Mavericks v10.9 or later:

1. Choose Apple menu > System Preferences. Click iCloud, then select Keychain.
2. When asked to enter your iCloud Security Code, click Forgot Code.
3. Click Reset Keychain to replace your iCloud Keychain in the cloud with the iCloud Keychain items on your Mac.
4. Click Reset to confirm. You'll be asked to create a new iCloud Security Code.

mx250man thank you for the tip. I was experiencing several issues with Keychain (will continue to rely on 1Password) and had the exact same problem as the OP...uncheck "Keychain" in iCloud preferences and it would immediately re-check itself. ???

Doing as you suggested resolved the problem. Absurd but I suppose there's a method to that madness somewhere. Or it's a bug that'll get ironed out. :\

Thanks again!

The above worked for me on my Imac. It did not on my MBP. I got the exact same message

Keychain is a mess, it has several 'old' keychain passwords from my different device copied. Now I like to restart with a clean chain.

Deactivated keychain on alle my devices (including iphone and pads) except for the mbp ofcourse were i manually deleted all entries in the keychain.

activated one by one the devices again.

after a while, some of the "old" entries appear again...

So I'm wondering...does keychain need to be active on at least one device? That would explain why I could uncheck it on all of my Apple products except my iMac.

Now that it's only running on my iMac things seem to have settled down. Apparently 10.9.1 is due for release any minute now. Hopefully Apple will have sorted out this issue.

Same problem here. I can turn off iCloud Keychain on iPhone and iPad but I can't turn it off on the iMac (with keeping passwords stored on my Mac). Sync is not working between devices so I need to turn Keychain off on all devices before I turn it back on step by step.

None of the steps mentioned above have worked.

I had a similar problem on a macbook where I had just added an iCloud account with keychain checked. I was trying to delete it, but it would not because key chain was enabled. But I could not turn off key chain either. I tried the suggested steps found here and on other threads as well but it did not work.

But it got fixed when I actually completed the iCloud "new device added" (not sure of the exact wording) approval process. I had to accept or refuse the request to add this macbook on the other machine. Once I refused it, I was able to de-activate keychain, and then delete my iCloud account on that computer.