"secd" process draining battery after Sierra upgrade

Hello! I stumbled on your question because i was having the same problem with my macbook pro 2011, that I had just recently upgraded to Sierra OS. I noticed the fan would be running all the time, and the battery was just being drained too quickly. I was able to fix it by going to "activity monitor" and selecting the "energy" tab. There i found that a process called secd was running at 65% all the time. Btw, Secd is a security daemon you can google that if your interested it. but mainly, you double-click on the item line where it says secd and you can forcequit the process and voila my fan immediately stopped running and the mac stopped being overheated.

In your System/ICloud preference pane uncheck KeyChain.

Reboot and see if that reduces the CPU usage to normal levels.

I have this same issue after upgrading to Sierra; however, the box for Keychain in the iCloud prefs was not checked. Does anyone have another possible answer for this? I do not have CloudKeyChainSynchingproxy or CloudKeychainProxy using much CPU but I do have IDSKeychainSynchingProxy showing up as the #2 item for %CPU use. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Keychain unchecked in System preference - sec process still taking 70 to 102% of CPU since OS Sierra update.

Battery draining very fast and MacBook too hot to hold.

Any help?

Go to System Preferences / iCloud - ckeck Keychain, Not Now for password and Cancel. The process secd should disappear.

It worked for me.

I've spent about an hour trying to fix this and your advice worked. My wife doesn't use iCould Keychain on her 2013 iMac so I never checked that box. Doing what you suggested ended secd, which was using 70% of the CPU and absolutely killing the performance. Pretty serious bug but based on the lack of info out there it does not seem to be widespread.

For those of you who already had the Keychain box unchecked (like me) but still having the secd process running excessively, I checked the box and went through the full sign-in process, then restarted. Everything seems fine now. Hope this helps.

After upgrading my MacBook Pro to Sierra, secd was running at 95-100% with Keychain turned off.

Once I turned it on, secd instantly dropped to 0.1 - 0.5% and I could feel my machine breathe a sigh of relief (actually it stopped "breathing" :-)

Yes this worked! "secd" is now at 0,0 on my process monitor.

I had never user iCloud so I needed to open it once using my brand new Apple ID (just registered after 3 years on mavericks for sierra update) and then followed your steps. Thanks!!

Had the same problem but was able to fix using a variation of the previous answer. My Keychain was already unchecked, so I did the following steps:

1) Checked the Keychain box

2) Entered password to make changes but DID NOT hit Enter

3) Clicked on Cancel instead so that changes were not made

Believe it or not, the CPU activity for the secd dropped like a rock immediately.

Was having similar problem - suddenly MacBook air 11" battery started draining really, really fast, got very hot, and fan ran madly. Took to Genius Bar - nothing other than said battery checked out okay. Today, checked Activity Monitor and my workplace techie noticed "secd" was using over 80%. We googled and found this page. My Keychain was NOT checked, but I did what some of you said -- checked it, went through the set-up, and suddenly the "secd" bombed down to 0.0!!! Now, I hope that will address the battery drain! Will watch for a few days to see how this all goes. Apple you really need to be sending out some notices to us about these things!!!!!

KChain was unchecked on my Mac ... but after I signed out of ICloud (keep copies of files on your Mac), secd disappeared! (Now I can hear my thoughts not the fan!!! ha ha ...)