How many times have you logged in to your Mac and seen a pop-up that says “(this app) wants to use your ‘login’ keychain”? The keychain is Apple’s own password management system. It allows you to store passwords so the applications wanting to use them can. An application that uses the keychain a lot is Safari. If you have a lot of online logins, the keychain is a vital tool so you don’t have to remember them all (you should still have all of theses written down and stored securely in a safe place, like a house safe.)
Apple makes it easy for the user, because usually you only have to enter the master password once. Then the keychain takes over. The beauty of this is it is all authorized under your login password. Problems can arise when you reset your login password via the Terminal or the Password Reset utility in the recovery partition as these methods do not automatically update the keychain password, which means you will need to manually enter the old password every time.
Fortunately, there is a fix! Here is how you correct that:
- Open Keychain Access (you can get to it by choosing Utilities from the Go menu in the Finder)
- From the Edit menu, choose Change Password for Keychain “login.”
- Type the former password of the account that you are currently logged in to, then click OK.
- If you entered the correct password, a new window appears; enter the original password again in the Current Password field.
- In the New Password field, type the password that matches your current account password.
- Re-enter the newer password in the Verify field, then click OK.
If you do not know the old password, however, all of the items in the keychain are lost. In this instance, your only option is to delete the login keychain, and then run Keychain First Aid from the Keychain Access menu in Keychain Access.