Understanding Apple Keychain

[mac98aop]

Hi folks

I'm migrating from 1Password to iCloud Keychain, and only real thing is the UI, which for an Apple interface is interesting. I'm just never quite sure which item in the listing actually contains the login password, as when I search for say 'iCloud' dozens of entries pop up.

Do I need to start properly naming them to more accurately find them?!

Any tips?!

Thanks

Adam 

[Toby Leighton]

Keychain has been around as long as OSX has, hence its "functional" UI.  iCloud never used to be in the mix but now it is.  Keychain isn't just for your personal generated & stored passwords but for system use, and you can also have multiple keychains etc.

Rather than rambling about keychain, to address your question, no I wouldn't start renaming things in there, but in a similar way that 1password recommends you set up websites by capturing the login rather than manually creating it I'd let keychain do its thing its way

If you do want a safe way to experiment with renaming though, you could create a new keychain and copy+paste items between them, but I don't think anything other than the icloud keychain will be available to your other devices.

I started using 1Password in earnest many years ago whereas I used to use keychain before for generating and saving random different passwords, This wasn't only for sync, I used windows just as much as macs, and android just as much as iphone 1Password was the thing for me at the time.

The password management landscape is very different now, and I'm finding I only rely on 1Password for legacy stuff, as there are so many (free) options out there that are competitive.  I'm also considering migrating away from it

Toby

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[mac98aop]

Thanks for the detailed reply, Toby. Helpful stuff.

I guess my main question is how to navigate Keychain Access.app, when I need to find a password for use elsewhere (ie, when 'sync' doesn't work or apply)

When I search for a password relating to a website, app or username, I get a long list of all potential results and it's quite tricky to know which one relates to what I actually need. 1Password makes it a little easier to identify logins, but I'm keen to just have everything within iCloud Keychain going forward.

Any tips on quickly finding a login and password and making sense of what's what in the list you're given once you've searched?

Thanks again

[Toby Leighton]

I’ve got to be blunt, it sucks!

At least being able to filter results to only show “web form password” or just the iCloud Keychain would help. All you seem to be able to do is sort the columns to group web form passwords together. 

Lots of results come up as search is looking through all your keychains so it will be showing iCloud and your local system.

One thing I noticed is if you do a search for “(Passwords not saved)” you will turn up a lot of potentially useless entries that you may want to delete. 

On my computer searching for a website address isn’t too horrendous.  But there’s no flexibility for sorting or organising like you would have in other password managers.

I suppose a way of looking at this is that keychain isn’t a “password manager” per se. It’s where your systems save credentials and all sorts of other important security related items you really don’t want to mess with. Apple are kind enough to have a front end that can be used a last resort/troubleshooting tool without needing to resort to terminal commands. 

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[Sam - MacAmbulance]

Searching by username is often long-winded as you might re-use the same email address multiple times on different websites, or on different platforms.

I usually search keychain for the name of the server or website. I have over 2.5k saved passwords due to my job so it can be very slow searching at times.

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[mac98aop]

Thanks Toby and Sam. Really helpful.

But I'm now a bit confuzzled! I really want to migrate from 1Password and just use Keychain, but seems the latter isn't the place to just store logins and things as one might with 1P etc. 

Perhaps I should just use secure Notes for logins and passwords that fall out of the Keychain remit? Or is there an alternative  App or workflow setup you recommend?

Any ideas appreciated.  

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

I use encrypted Notes and iCloud Keychain, with 1Password as a fallback

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[Toby Leighton]

I'm kind of in the same boat as you, I still use 1Password as my day to day password manager, but rather than having the windows version installed on any computers I now look up the password on my phone and type it out.   All my windows (work related) password needs are met by devolutions remote desktop manager (enterprise, expensive, server based, and includes its own password management)

I don't want to pay for a subscription for any of these, and I'm steering in the direction of using either Firefox or Chromes built in password management

I did try out last pass a few years ago before they were bought by the logmein people, and it seemed similar to 1Password but the logmein company steers people to the subscription model by taking features away from the free offering once its reached a mass of users.  I didn't feel like playing that game

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[Tony Crooks]

Like what Sam said minus the 1Password bit.

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Tony Crooks
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[Tony Crooks]

As I’m primarily an iPhone/iPad user these days the Passwords bit in Settings I find useful as it both identifies passwords that have been compromised as well as those that you might benefit from using a stronger one. And its easy to find and syncs across devices.