Interest in trying to sort out keychain problems hasn’t subsided, and some of my most popular articles here attempt to help. However, my original little diagnostic tool, KeychainCheck, was never more than a quick hack, and I’d like to offer something more helpful. Here is my first alpha release of the next version, KeychainCheck 2.

For the moment, its interface is very basic, and it doesn’t even have its own app icon. I wanted to get the first part of its engine in place to start with, and this release is already quite different from the hack that went before it.

Previous versions of KeychainCheck were script-like in that they relied on making command calls to obtain their information. KeychainCheck 2 works directly with macOS support libraries, which gives it considerably more power. The snag with doing this is that most of the calls use old Objective-C and even C interfaces, so are tedious and prone to error.

Another major change is that, as in T2M2, I am using parsed log extracts to supplement the information, and hopefully to perform diagnostics. In this version, this works well in Sierra, where keychain activity is well-recorded in the unified log, but is of little help in High Sierra, where it is all but missing. I don’t think that there is anything to be done about that, though, unless Apple changes its policy.

I also wanted this version to work properly regardless of whether you are using local keychains, or iCloud Keychain. As far as I can see, it does.

Finally, I wanted to have some useful control functions which can change things: this first release lets you lock and unlock your default (login) keychain, something which you’d otherwise have to use Keychain Access to do.

Although this is an alpha release, and thus prone to crash and otherwise misbehave, the only thing that it does to change any keychains is to lock/unlock your login keychain. It should therefore not put your keychains at any risk, although it is always wise to ensure that non-system keychains are properly backed up.

You can download this first test release here: keychaincheck20a2
and in Downloads above.

Please let me know how you get on with it.