Keychain and Mac OS Lion upgrade issue

Question

After upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, I am getting a pop-up sometimes:

 syncdefaultsd wants to use the "login" keychain

It prompts for keychain password. ps aux does not show any process called syncdefaultsd. Time Machine is turned off. iCloud is on. Which application does that process belong to? How can I get rid of the annoying pop-up?

Frodina

Answer 1

syncdefaultsdis a system agent (launchd definition file is /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.syncdefaultsd.plist) and part of the private SyncedDefaults framework residing in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/ in Lion version 10.7.2. As a private framework, it is not documented in the Lion SDK, but the fact a private framework of the same name exists in iOS 5 makes me surmise it is part of the iCloud synchronization infrastructure.

Your popup is either:

• the request for permission to access an iCloud item stored in your keychain; in that case, the dialog displayed in such situations offers the option to deny access, grant access and permanently grant access – that last option would be the one you need.
• a request for unlocking the keychain as a whole – that dialog only takes your password. This happens because your keychain is locked. To get rid of the dialog, you need to disable both keychain locking on sleep and locking after idle time in the Keychain Access app.

Malka

The dialog does not allow you to permanently grant access. I've had this dialog come up when the machine was asleep. Entering the password and granting access left the machine in a locked state, requiring a hard restart. I believe, some other process timed out while waiting for the dialog, and Lion was unable to recover. – Autarky

Do you happen to have your login keychain set to lock on sleep? You can check that in Keychain Access by selecting Edit » Change Settings for Keychain “Login”…. If yes, disable the lock on idle / lock on sleep options. If no, could you provide a screenshot, or barring that (what with the machine being locked), the exact wording of the dialog that pops up? – Malka

Same problem. Screenshot: screencast.com/t/2E8PKMHtYJ. Also keychain settings: screencast.com/t/G4OwUkRDtqH – Rightful

@kevin-dewalt Please disable the first option too. The dialog you see is not an access request to a specific keychain item, it is a request to unlock the whole login keychain (which has been locked after idle time). The only way to make this go away is not to have the keychain lock :). – Malka

Edited my answer to take the global keychain unlocking into account. – Malka

@techraf thanks for the heads up; alas, as that did not come from me, all I could do was remove it. – Malka

Wish Apple would do the same with this agent ;-) – Caputo