When connecting to various online services, your Mac will use certificates to validate a connection. If a certificate being used for a connection is expired or invalid, then OS X will notify you of this when attempting to use it, and offer you the choice of continuing with the connection, inspecting the certificate, or canceling the connection. Such warnings are convenient for detecting an invalid connection, such as one that might be malicious, so if they happen then consider looking into them; however, there may be times when practically every connection you attempt gives you a certificate warning. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Keychain Access
Can’t remember passwords? Here are two ways to reveal them.
If you’re browsing the Web and need to either create a new account or log into an existing one, then you will likely need to enter your password. To help with this, OS X will prompt you to store your password in the OS X keychain, which will encrypt and assign the password to the site you have just accessed. This is similarly applied to programs you may use, such as e-mail clients, which will attempt to access secured resources like your e-mail accounts or social media pages. However, the convenience this provides may result in your inability to remember your passwords, even for sites you regularly frequent. Continue reading
Manage OS X always asking to use your keychain passwords
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. Continue reading
Protect your Mac from a password-revealing security flaw
A security issue exists in OS X where if you are logged into your Mac, any individual may sit down at your system and gain access to the passwords in your keychain.
When you save passwords to your keychain in OS X, your Mac will automatically allow access to them for specific services, such as Mail for logging into your e-mail accounts. However, other services that access them will be required to authenticate before they have access to the password, especially those that will reveal your password in plain text. Continue reading
How to view your saved passwords in OS X
When you ever entered a password in a Web page, and then save it in your keychain, you may find yourself relying solely on autofill to enter this password at later times. While the use of autofill is convenient, in instances where you have come to rely on it, you may find yourself forgetting or not even knowing your password.
For instance, when creating an online account you might use Apple’s automatic password creator that creates a random Continue reading