Re: Is Keychain or any other program safe for storing sensitive data on a desktop Mac?

From	Jolly Roger <jollyroger@pobox.com>
Newsgroups	comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject	Re: Is Keychain or any other program safe for storing sensitive data on a desktop Mac?
Date	2018-11-08 15:59 +0000
Organization	People for the Ethical Treatment of Pirates
Message-ID	<g4j4rkFlb7aU1@mid.individual.net> (permalink)
References	<2018110721595581963-tomevans9890@yahoo.ca>

Show all headers | View raw

On 2018-11-08, Tom Evans <tomevans9890@yahoo.ca> wrote:
> Is Keychain or any other program safe for storing passcodes on a desktop Mac?

Very.

Keychain is a securely encrypted password manager that is built into
Apple operating systems including macOS and iOS. The information in the
keychain is encrypted and stored in an SQLite database on the file
system. 

Keychain can contain various types of data including:

* passwords (for websites, FTP servers, SSH accounts, network shares,
* wireless networks, groupware applications, encrypted disk images),
* credit card details, 
* private keys, 
* certificates, and 
* secure notes

Apple and third-party applications can offer to remember and store
passwords, credit card details, and so on in Keychain so that the user
does not have to type them again upon subsequent logins. For instance,
the Apple Mail application stores your mail account passwords in
Keychain so that you do not need to enter them each time you check
email. The Safari web browser stores login credentials to websites in
Keychain so that the next time you connect to a web site, the
credentials will be entered for you. Third-party apps in macOS and iOS
also routinely store sensitive login credentials and other details in
Keychain for safe keeping.  

iCloud Keychain is just an extension to the Keychain facility that
securely and seamlessly synchronizes your Keychain to all of your Apple
devices so that a piece of information remembered on one device will
automatically be available all of your other devices. So a password
remembered one device will automatically be on all of your other
devices, which means you don’t need to enter it on your other devices.

<https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204085>

Apple has gone to great lengths to protect the data stored in Keychain
on your devices.

<https://tidbits.com/2014/03/01/how-to-protect-your-icloud-keychain-from-the-nsa/>

The iOS Security Guide white paper provides a lot of technical detail if
you’re interested.

<https://www.apple.com/business/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf>

As with many of Apple’s secure facilities, any new device attempting to
read Keychain information requires one of:

* verification from an existing registered device through a push
* notification with manual acceptance your iCloud Security Code an SMS
* verification to your registered phone number

To enhance security, you can also protect your iCloud / Apple ID account
with two-factor authentication, which causes push notifications to all
registered devices and corresponding email messages anytime your
password is used on a new device.

<https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204915>

I highly recommending iCloud Keychain, because it is very secure and
greatly increases your productivity.

-- 
E-mail sent to this address may be devoured by my ravenous SPAM filter.
I often ignore posts from Google. Use a real news client instead.

JR

Thread

csiph-web