Trying to delete wifi certificate in Keychain Access; continually crashes

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.

Step 1

For this step, the title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

In the top right corner of the Console window, there's a search box labeled Filter. Initially the words "String Matching" are shown in that box. Enter the name of the crashed application or process. For example, if Safari crashed, you would enter "Safari" (without the quotes.)

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Select the messages from the time of the last crash, if any. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

☞ The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

☞ Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Step 2

In the Console window, select

DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION ▹ User Diagnostic Reports

(not Diagnostic and Usage Messages) from the log list on the left. There is a disclosure triangle to the left of the list item. If the triangle is pointing to the right, click it so that it points down. You'll see a list of crash reports. The name of each report starts with the name of the process, and ends with ".crash". Select the most recent report related to the process in question. The contents of the report will appear on the right. Use copy and paste to post the entire contents—the text, not a screenshot.

I know the report is long, maybe several hundred lines. Please post all of it anyway.

If you don't see any reports listed, but you know there was a crash, you may have chosen Diagnostic and Usage Messages from the log list. Choose DIAGNOSTIC AND USAGE INFORMATION instead.

In the interest of privacy, I suggest that, before posting, you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.)

Please don’t post other kinds of diagnostic report—they're very long and rarely helpful.

Error on mine OS 10.10.5. This is happening on 2 of my Macs.

9/3/15 4:18:58.589 PM ReportCrash[54899]: Saved crash report for Keychain Access[54893] version 9.0 (55161) to /Users/steve/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/Keychain Access_2015-09-03-161858_Fulcrum.crash

9/3/15 4:18:58.713 PM Problem Reporter[54900]: Failed to connect (_imageWell) outlet from (ProblemReportWindowController) to (NSImageView): missing setter or instance variable

From Crash Log:

Process: Keychain Access [54893]

Path: /Applications/Utilities/Keychain Access.app/Contents/MacOS/Keychain Access

Identifier: com.apple.keychainaccess

Version: 9.0 (55161)

Build Info: KeychainAccess-55161000000000000~632

Code Type: X86-64 (Native)

Parent Process: ??? [1]

Responsible: Keychain Access [54893]

User ID: 1025

Date/Time: 2015-09-03 16:18:57.852 -0700

OS Version: Mac OS X 10.10.5 (14F27)

Report Version: 11

Anonymous UUID: C4FB6281-76B8-F991-BD39-17B18BAC24FD

Sleep/Wake UUID: 2344DB6E-4E99-4082-AF62-B45740BE548E

Time Awake Since Boot: 470000 seconds

Time Since Wake: 29000 seconds

Crashed Thread: 0 Dispatch queue: com.apple.main-thread

Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV)

Exception Codes: EXC_I386_GPFLT

Application Specific Information:

objc_msgSend() selector name: retain

Performing @selector(delete:) from sender NSMenuItem 0x6000002a2ee0

Having this exact issue as well. Attempted to add a certificate from Chrome that I get when attempting to log into my router over https. Now I can't log into my router from this system (yes I verified from another system with no problem) and all I did was attempt to add the certificate to keychain. Now I can't delete it. I get the same error code @selector(delete:)... respectively.

sydistic, Mike Kormendy (I'm guessing that the OP has given up by now):

You might want to see a post by Linc Davis in this other thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6696657?answerId=27193175022#27193175022

Basically, it suggests logging into another user to run Keychain Access to delete the item(s). You can log into a regular user account, and when prompted enter your usual admin credentials.

I had the same or very similar problem on Yosemite -- Keychain Access would crash whenever I tried to delete any item in the system keychain -- and Linc's suggestion seems to have fixed the problem for me. Not only was I able to delete the item using the other account, now it appears that I can delete other system keychain items using my usual account without causing the previously-consistent crash.

In my case Keychain Access was crashing with Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL) or Exception Type: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (SIGSEGV) as shown in the User Diagnostic reports in Console. IIRC it didn't happen when deleting items from my login keychain, only the system one.

(I'm getting odd system log errors when Yosemite tries to mount my Time Capsule's drive, so I was trying to delete some old Airport- and Time Machine- related password entries which referred to devices no longer in existence. That's why I felt fairly confident that deleting them would be OK -- but don't take my word on that! So far I haven't tracked it down, though.)

Good luck!

Brian,.

I ended up researching a bit more, and came to the conclusion that there's simply some sort of critical issue with the keychain app.

I was however successful using the terminal to delete the keys. Googling "delete entry terminal keychain" came up with plenty of solutions that were pretty much all the same.

I ended up deciding to export my keychain and wipe it all clean as I had a number of keys that I wanted to clean out and the task became too cumbersome.

To export out the keychain, I forked a github gist of a ruby script that exports the keys to a CSV file.

I can't say that it works for certificates unfortunately.

I made one modification to the ruby file before running it, commenting out (with a '#' character at the beginning) the following line:

proto.gsub!('htps', 'https');

This corrected the errors I was having when exporting the keys to the csv file.

The applescript that the original author included was a nice addition to automatically click the allow button that pops up.

Let the script run for a little bit and a short while later in the same folder you will find a CSV file with all of your passwords.

Now I have a clean keychain on my system at least.

Mike Kormendy wrote:

I ended up researching a bit more, and came to the conclusion that there's simply some sort of critical issue with the keychain app.

...

To export out the keychain, I forked a github gist of a ruby script that exports the keys to a CSV file.

I can't say that it works for certificates unfortunately.

I made one modification to the ruby file ..

Now I have a clean keychain on my system at least.

Mike - I agree with you about issues with the keychain app. Contrary to what I reported above, my usual admin account still can't use Keychain Access to delete items from the system keychain -- each attempt causes Keychain Access.app to crash in @selector(delete:). Interestingly, I found that I could open Get Info for an item, change the Access Control setting to "Allow all applications to access the item" (instead of the default "Confirm before allowing access"), save the changes, and then I could successfully delete the item from the system keychain. So it seems the crash in my case is related to the need to confirm the deletion.

Thanks for the info on ways to export the keychain values. That ruby script looks good, and it tipped me off to the existence of the security (and leaks) command, which I didn't know about. I may follow your example and use the script, although I'm leaning toward doing a format and fresh clean install of El Capitan and my applications sometime in the future which would certainly clear up my keychain issues. (After nearly 8 years of updating OS X in-place or with Migration Assistant, I've occasionally found some odd things carried forward, though overall I'm very impressed with how well the OS X upgrade & Migration Assistant have worked.)

I am wondering how you are planning to get the passwords back into your keychain. There's an import sub-command but it refers to file formats I'm not familiar with (openssl, bsafe, raw, pkcs7, pkcs8, pkcs12, x509, openssh1, openssh2, and pemseq) and doesn't appear to read CSV.

Also, regarding certificates, you can't say it works because you didn't try it, or because you know it doesn't work with certificates?

Thanks for the info!

Brian M. Holmes wrote:

Mike Kormendy wrote:

I ended up researching a bit more, and came to the conclusion that there's simply some sort of critical issue with the keychain app.

...

To export out the keychain, I forked a github gist of a ruby script that exports the keys to a CSV file.

I can't say that it works for certificates unfortunately.

I made one modification to the ruby file ..

Now I have a clean keychain on my system at least.

Mike - I agree with you about issues with the keychain app. Contrary to what I reported above, my usual admin account still can't use Keychain Access to delete items from the system keychain -- each attempt causes Keychain Access.app to crash in @selector(delete:). Interestingly, I found that I could open Get Info for an item, change the Access Control setting to "Allow all applications to access the item" (instead of the default "Confirm before allowing access"), save the changes, and then I could successfully delete the item from the system keychain. So it seems the crash in my case is related to the need to confirm the deletion.

Thanks for the info on ways to export the keychain values. That ruby script looks good, and it tipped me off to the existence of the security (and leaks) command, which I didn't know about. I may follow your example and use the script, although I'm leaning toward doing a format and fresh clean install of El Capitan and my applications sometime in the future which would certainly clear up my keychain issues. (After nearly 8 years of updating OS X in-place or with Migration Assistant, I've occasionally found some odd things carried forward, though overall I'm very impressed with how well the OS X upgrade & Migration Assistant have worked.)

I am wondering how you are planning to get the passwords back into your keychain. There's an import sub-command but it refers to file formats I'm not familiar with (openssl, bsafe, raw, pkcs7, pkcs8, pkcs12, x509, openssh1, openssh2, and pemseq) and doesn't appear to read CSV.

Also, regarding certificates, you can't say it works because you didn't try it, or because you know it doesn't work with certificates?

Thanks for the info!

Glad anything helped or was interesting.

I don't plan to import my password back into keychain. If i need a password, I just go back to my passwords file and delete the entry after I'm done with success. Most of my use for passwords is while browsing (which Chrome saves encrypted in my profile anyhow), and I spent the time to manually enter the ones that the system uses when it started asking me for them again after this process.

The importer that it uses is for importing certificates as far as I'm aware, and not a password list flat file, but I could be wrong.

With the certificates, just looking through the ruby script, I didn't see any implementation for saving out the certificate files. When I ran the export process, the only file that was outputted was the CSV of passwords.

Cheers and good luck!