Keychain Keeps Asking For Password El Capitan

5 min readNov 4, 2021

After you or your Mac administrator resets the password of your macOS user account, your Mac might ask you to update your keychain password or enter the password of your login keychain. It might also tell you that the system was unable to unlock your login keychain. That’s because your login keychain is still using your old password.

Aug 10, 2014 5b) At bottom left, check the box to the left of “Show Password.” 5c) A window appears asking for the “keychain password.” I used my user account password, the one I use to log onto my computer. Mine is an administrator password. 5d) The password is revealed! 5e) Is the password wrong?

If you don’t know your old password

If you don’t know your old password, the solution is to create a new login keychain.

4) Click on “Keychain Access” in the top left menu. Select “Preferences” from the drop-down menu. 5) The Preferences window will open. Click on “Reset My Default Keychain.” 6) Enter the most recent password you use to log into your account (this is most likely your Liberal Arts password) and click “OK.”.
(I’m on El Capitan, the Keychain Access is Version 9.0 (55171.20.2)) Related discussions, but none of them helped: OSX is repeatedly asking for login keychain password; Mac asking for multiple ‘login’ keychain app passwords but won’t accept them; How to stop my machine asking for multiple passwords when I log in?

If you know your old password

If you know your old password, use that password to update your existing login keychain:

Open the Keychain Access app, which is in the the Utilities folder of your Applications folder.
From the list of keychains on the left side of the window, select ‘login.’
From the Edit menu in the menu bar, choose “Change Password for Keychain ‘login.’”
Enter the old password of your user account in the Current Password field. This is the password you were using before the password was reset.
Enter the new password of your user account in the New Password field. This is the password you’re now using to log in to your Mac. Enter the same password in the Verify field.
Click OK when done, then quit Keychain Access.

The keychain in OS X should run seamlessly in the background to store and retrieve passwords for the various services you use. At most it should ask you for a password once or twice when you initially access a service, but there may be times when you regularly see messages pop up on your Mac that indicate a certain program or service is trying to access your keychain. When this happens, a dialogue box will appear with the words “PROGRAM_NAME wants to use the ‘login’ keychain’ with an option to supply your password and confirm or deny the request.

This type of request is expected for new services you are using, but after you have granted access, then this should no longer appear. If it does, then there may be some configuration settings that you can try to help fix the problem:

Turn off keychain auto-lock

One security feature that is available for all keychains on your Mac is the ability to automatically lock after a given period of no activity or if you have slept the computer. Note that these are separate from screen locks which do the same thing, but which require passwords to access the entire computer. With these auto-lock features, the system can still be used, but the keychain will simply require authentication again.

You can access the settings for these features with a few quick steps:

Open the Keychain Access utility (in Applications > Utilities)
Right-click your login keychain and choose the “Change settings for …” option
Uncheck the two checkboxes to disable auto-lock features, or otherwise modify them to your needs.

If you wish to keep of these behaviors, then one helpful feature is to go to the General section of the Keychain Access preferences and enable “Show keychain status in menu bar”, which will display a new menu extra that looks like a small lock. If the keychain is unlocked then the lock will appear open, but if not then the lock will appear locked.

These two options may have your keychains automatically locking and then repeatedly requiring your password.

Run keychain first aid

If your keychains are not working properly, then Keychain Access can help ensure they are in working order and using the expected behaviors, but you have to first ensure Keychain Access is set to apply these behaviors to keychains when First Aid is run:

Go to Keychain Access’ preferences
Select the First Aid tab
Ensure at least the bottom three options are checked
Close the preferences and press Option-Command-A to open the First Aid panel
Run the first aid verification, and then repair if any errors are found

Ensure at least the bottom three options here are checked before running the First Aid routine on any of your keychains.

Remove iCloud keychain and re-add

If you are using the iCloud Keychain feature to synchronize passwords between your various Apple devices, then try resetting this on your current Mac by gong to the iCloud system preferences and unchecking the Keychain service. Confirm you wish to continue, and then re-check the box to associate your iCloud keychain again. When you do this, the system will remove and re-add your keychain and in doing so hopefully clear the problem at hand.

Reset local login keychain

A final option is to completely reset your local login keychain, which will start you off with a fresh keychain file that your apps and services will use for storing passwords. When you do this, you will have full access to your old keychain so you will not lose any passwords, but OS X will simply not use them at the moment and require you enter your passwords again:

Open Keychain Access
Go to the Keychain Access preference
Click Reset My Default Keychain
Confirm this action and wait a short moment