AaronBaecker.com

Ever since I recently upgraded to OS X 10.6.4, I have had problems with the Keychain giving me the error “Access to this item is restricted.” when trying to access passwords stored in various keychains.  I first had this problem after the hard drive in one of my systems crashed and my data had to be restored from backup.  It appeared at that time that the permissions and probably something much deeper on Keychain Access application files were so screwed up as to render Keychain Access’ permission to read items out of a keychain worthless.  I finally fixed that problem by dipping into the original OS X install media to extract the original Keychain Access application files.

This time around, it appears as though the Keychain Access application has again been modified – leaving me with a set of next-to-useless keychains.  You can imagine the drama that played out on my end when I was trying to figure out how I was going to recover all of the passwords that I had so responsibly and securely stored.  I ran Disk Utility, which found and repaired some permissions issues on a few of the Keychain Access files, but that didn’t fix the problem.  So what I finally resorted to – again – was opening a backup and restoring a pre-10.6.4 copy of Keychain Access back to my hard drive (in a different location on disk).  This resolution was successful and allowed me to retrieve all of my keychain items.

I now need to probably build brand new keychains from them that I can open in the most-recent version of Keychain Access.   I’m also ready to ditch Keychains altogether for everything except the login keychain.  When Apple provides a utility that is supposed to securely store items, it shouldn’t leave me potentially high-and-dry twice in the span of less than a year with the prospect of not being able to recover any of my secure items.