There is a lot of documentation from Apple on how all of this works, but this is indeed expected behaviour. A way to make this smoother would have been:
1. Doing the password reset
2. Reboot straight back into recovery
3. Update your new password back into your old password
4. Boot into macOS, your default keychain will unlock but you'll still have to re-authenticate to iCloud since your machine-user identity combo will no longer match with what iCloud expects. (not sure if this is part of Octagon Trust, but there are various interesting layers to this)
There are a number of much more in-depth technical guides and specs, but just listing out random articles (or the Black Hat talk(s)) would probably rob someone of a nice excursion into platform security.
The article was based on the heat or in the panic of the situation where i need to get work done for which i was being paid and also my search results on the icloud/keychain recovery didnt yield any useful the results.
Oh yeah, you got the same process down pretty much yourself, wasn't an RTFM dig or anything like that. It was more aimed at others who might end up here, more tools, more better!
It's interesting how with some systems/engineering thinking you'll pretty much always get there in the end anyway, which is also why articles like yours are pretty neat. (sadly, not everyone takes the time to write things down and share them these days)
Based on this description, it sounds like someone walking past your unattended desk and bent on disrupting your day but not stealing your data, could enter in a garbage password into the lock screen a few times and lock you out of your own laptop.
I guess the same also works for cloud accounts as well. I remember, back in the mid-2000s, trying to log into my hotmail account (never having failed to log in before) and getting a "locked out due to too many bad passwords". So someone, only knowing my user account name (which was the same as my email address), locked me out of my own account. The problem was, I couldn't remember what my recovery accounts were (I eventually figured it out).
Heck, once I cycled for half an hour with my iPhone in my pocket, and somehow the phone against my leg was in just the right position that it kept interpreting my leg movements as trying to enter a passcode.
Got home, pulled out my phone, and it had a message that it was locked for several hours due to so many failed passcode attempts. Incredibly annoying.
Still, only happened once in well over a decade of owning an iPhone.
I was mostly frustrated that there wasn't some alternate way of regaining access, like via my Mac or iPad logged in with the same Apple ID. Or that the failed passcode attempts didn't start eventually playing a loud alert sound or something on each failure.
Yeah I used to get this a lot because I have my phone in my pocket when I'm doing land maintenance around the place here. It's massively annoying. That and watch gestures firing off and interrupting the music I'm listening to while I'm using powertools.
I've had to turn off a lot of features. All of the "raise to wake", always-on screens, gesture controls, movement controls on the watch, live activities on the watch, all sorts of stuff, anything related to movement or waking up the phone other than by a button press. Also had to turn the watch so the buttons are on the left to stop my gloves pressing them constantly.
It's a bit sad really, I think I've missed out on some decent features there. But compared to being locked out and/or having random actions trigger, it's an improvement.
On my pixel 4a, I had to turn off a "call 911" feature that I think was initiated by shaking the phone. I took a couple of walks with the phone in my front pocket, and the movement from my leg called 911 (which I would only find out when the police would call me back to ask if everything is OK).
Yeah that is unfortunate and embarassing. I think I nearly called them a couple of times before I flipped my watch around.
Current gripe is that every so often, usually when my hands are busy, Siri interprets my "Hey Siri fast forward" to skip an ad on the podcast I'm listening to as an instruction to call Troy. Troy is a roofer I got to quote some work last year! He has picked up twice to me going "Sorry, really sorry, my robot called you ..."
Remember entering password to one service I subscribed to. It was Friday evening. I typed it wrong 5 times and my account was locked out with a message to contact customer service. Customer service was open from Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. So I was unable to use it for a couple of days. It was painful experience. I found an alternative though and on Monday cancelled it.
The description is misleading. What made the OS create a new keychain was resetting their login password, not the failed password attempts.
(The login keychain is encrypted using the user's password, so it's reasonable to create a new one when the password is changed - otherwise, you end up in a situation where applications constantly pop up prompts for a password the user doesn't know every time they try to access the keychain, e.g. to load saved passwords in Safari. I've seen this happen on older versions of macOS and it's positively infuriating.)
Keychain is one of the worst APIs on Apple platforms, with parts that date all the way back to MacOS 9. It's not surprising there are various breaking bugs from decades of low maintenance.
When I first switched to Mac from Windows I was really fascinated by the fact that generally you _could_ figure things out on your own and fix your system by just examining the filesystem structure (in recovery root shell). E.g. I once decided I want to try out Mac OS X server on my laptop and for whatever reason the install process got stuck, preventing me from logging in. To fix it I've just rebooted in recovery mode, found some lock file present (something like server-install.lock), removed it and then got my desktop back :). I was able to do it because the naming conventions in the OS filesystem were so easy to understand. I've then discovered that my "Sharing" preferences pane also disappeared and I was able to find it in the system folders, renamed to "Sharing.prefpane-stowed-away" or something like this. I've removed the unnecessary suffix and got my prefpane back.
I don't think modern macOS is as easy to tinker with anymore and I never had the need to fix it manually ever again either — but it felt incredibly cool to be able to fix it myself without any manual or even internet access for that matter.
I kinda feel uncomfortable with the comfort of Touch ID. So, I tend to type Passwords once in a while to keep my muscle memory, especially for key accounts, which are the entry points to other Passwords (Apple, 1Password, Google, etc.).
These days, I believe that the only reason one does not get such misfortunes of being hacked/attacked, is that most of us are not important enough to get the attention of any external threats. Hence, mostly luck more than actually being secure.
I have been working towards a process/pattern, as a last resort, to be able to walk out of anything and have backup options when misfortunes strikes or my luck runs out. I don’t even know the path yet.
Forgetting what the password is because you always just use the fingerprint reader…that’s why for elderly family members I nowadays set it up not to use the fingerprint any more. I thought they’d be annoyed but funnily enough they experience it as a sense of agency, that they are the one unlocking the computer and are in charge of it.
Apple Keychain has a number of old bugs that have caused me to have to resort to this strategy several times. The most common problem is having a secure note that you can open, but then immediately disappears (closes). Copying over an older keychain database can sometimes solve the problem.
Is there really no supported model for this scenario? Surely the point of an iCloud backup is that you can restore from the cloud rather than do a local hack to try to regain access to locked keychain db.
What happens if you just set up the device as a new machine and login to your iCloud like normal?
Good information to have. I was surprised by step 2 though (rm login.keychain-db). How can you be absolutely sure it doesn't contain anything important and you won't need it later?
I'd probably opt for a more defensive action here and just rename it (like the original reset did).
This is one of those articles that either people will stumble upon when they are up a creek without a paddle... or... something 100 ai slop articles will poorly summarize in their "11 ways to recover your icloud data" article.
> Still, I had assumed there might be some kind of master key that would handle this automatically during a password reset.
This assumption, by a clearly technical person, is a fundamental problem that keeps "the rest of the world" locked in to centralised services where that is true, and where that master key can be used against them by law enforcement, fascist regimes, and surveillance capitalists.
37 comments
There are a number of much more in-depth technical guides and specs, but just listing out random articles (or the Black Hat talk(s)) would probably rob someone of a nice excursion into platform security.
It's interesting how with some systems/engineering thinking you'll pretty much always get there in the end anyway, which is also why articles like yours are pretty neat. (sadly, not everyone takes the time to write things down and share them these days)
I guess the same also works for cloud accounts as well. I remember, back in the mid-2000s, trying to log into my hotmail account (never having failed to log in before) and getting a "locked out due to too many bad passwords". So someone, only knowing my user account name (which was the same as my email address), locked me out of my own account. The problem was, I couldn't remember what my recovery accounts were (I eventually figured it out).
Got home, pulled out my phone, and it had a message that it was locked for several hours due to so many failed passcode attempts. Incredibly annoying.
Still, only happened once in well over a decade of owning an iPhone.
I was mostly frustrated that there wasn't some alternate way of regaining access, like via my Mac or iPad logged in with the same Apple ID. Or that the failed passcode attempts didn't start eventually playing a loud alert sound or something on each failure.
I've had to turn off a lot of features. All of the "raise to wake", always-on screens, gesture controls, movement controls on the watch, live activities on the watch, all sorts of stuff, anything related to movement or waking up the phone other than by a button press. Also had to turn the watch so the buttons are on the left to stop my gloves pressing them constantly.
It's a bit sad really, I think I've missed out on some decent features there. But compared to being locked out and/or having random actions trigger, it's an improvement.
>I've had to turn off a lot of features.
On my pixel 4a, I had to turn off a "call 911" feature that I think was initiated by shaking the phone. I took a couple of walks with the phone in my front pocket, and the movement from my leg called 911 (which I would only find out when the police would call me back to ask if everything is OK).
Current gripe is that every so often, usually when my hands are busy, Siri interprets my "Hey Siri fast forward" to skip an ad on the podcast I'm listening to as an instruction to call Troy. Troy is a roofer I got to quote some work last year! He has picked up twice to me going "Sorry, really sorry, my robot called you ..."
It makes sense for 4 digit codes, but I have a 20ish character password, I once locked myself out, and it was an incredibly frustrating experience.
My password can't be brute forced even with offline access to the hash, there is no risk of it being brute forced from keyboard input.
(The login keychain is encrypted using the user's password, so it's reasonable to create a new one when the password is changed - otherwise, you end up in a situation where applications constantly pop up prompts for a password the user doesn't know every time they try to access the keychain, e.g. to load saved passwords in Safari. I've seen this happen on older versions of macOS and it's positively infuriating.)
I don't think modern macOS is as easy to tinker with anymore and I never had the need to fix it manually ever again either — but it felt incredibly cool to be able to fix it myself without any manual or even internet access for that matter.
These days, I believe that the only reason one does not get such misfortunes of being hacked/attacked, is that most of us are not important enough to get the attention of any external threats. Hence, mostly luck more than actually being secure.
I have been working towards a process/pattern, as a last resort, to be able to walk out of anything and have backup options when misfortunes strikes or my luck runs out. I don’t even know the path yet.
What happens if you just set up the device as a new machine and login to your iCloud like normal?
I'd probably opt for a more defensive action here and just rename it (like the original reset did).
> Still, I had assumed there might be some kind of master key that would handle this automatically during a password reset.
This assumption, by a clearly technical person, is a fundamental problem that keeps "the rest of the world" locked in to centralised services where that is true, and where that master key can be used against them by law enforcement, fascist regimes, and surveillance capitalists.