Keychain

One travels with you, and one stays in a single place.

A synced passkey lives in a cloud account you already trust, like Apple's iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager.

The key gets encrypted on your device before it's stored, and it syncs across your devices.

So the passkey you create on your phone shows up on your laptop.

Now, anyone can make a root certificate.

You can go into the Keychain Access app on your Mac right now and make a self-signed certificate.

It means nothing.

It's actually a genuinely useful thing to do because if you have a home network with, say, a NAS and a few other bits and bobs and websites that keep warning you about their security cert and all these scary warnings, you can use a self-signed cert to fix that problem by making your own secret certificate authority on your own Mac Or why haven't you ever told me

And then it won't work yet.

And the reason it won't work yet is because for a certificate that signed itself to have any meaning, you have to tell your computer to trust that certificate.

And so if you, in the keychain access, you'll find that there's a keychain called System Roots.

That contains the self-signed certificates for all of the officially recognized certificate authorities.

Yeah.

And boy, it's really hard to forget about removing credentials from Keychain.

There's stuff that is just buried in there and hashed and even running terminal commands to try to remove it, running the Office Reset website where you can download a utility to reset Microsoft credentials.

i literally worked on i had a couple others that weren't quite this long but the one that i worked on last yesterday during the day was like almost two hours and i couldn't build them for all that time because i don't that's my style right yeah i wasn't even gonna ask yeah and I completely removed Microsoft, redownloaded it, reset all the credentials, ran terminal commands.

Let's be honest.

It's not good, so I can't use Keychain really.

I, I, there isn't an answer except just use password123 for everything.

It's fine.

I, I think, honestly, I'd probably rather have two or three solutions that could just almost sync between each other.

That would be quite good.

Like the Google thing, like the Apple Keychain.

Maybe another-

Learn more at xage.com. That's X-A-G-E.com.

[upbeat music] The word is iCloud Keychain.

Spelled iCloud, as in Apple's cloud storage and cloud computing service, and Keychain, as in a device used to hold keys.

Definition, a cloud-based sensitive information management system that allows users access across multiple devices.

Example sentence, Kevin uses the iCloud Keychain to automatically fill in his Google Gmail password after he logs into his phone with Face ID.

Origin and context.

iCloud Keychain is Apple's password management system installed by default by iOS and macOS.

It allows users to store their passwords, credit card information, and other sensitive data in a secure encrypted format.

More importantly on Mac OS that you know some of these utilities that you'll find for Mac OS.

Things like Mission Control, Keychain, Spotlight.

They're really good at naming things over on Apple.

So I think that's a really good example of this.

The sensitive data is military-grade encrypted.

And so when we start talking in later sessions about using passwords from iCloud, what, what used to be called iCloud Keychain, that's also been renamed to just being the Passwords app.

A lot of people still say Keychain 'cause we're in the habit from decades of saying it, and it sounds cool, right? [laughs] But, you know, whatever.

Um, when we start talking about that, when we start talking about using what are known as continuity features, right? Meaning that I can start, uh, a phone call on one device and transfer it to another device mid-call, or I'm working on an email on one device, I can just continue right where I left off on another.

Yeah

... about Apple Keychain.

It's just, it has made me not a...

It's alleve, uh, relieved a lot of stress for me.