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Exporting (iCloud) Keychain and Safari credentials to a CSV file

Exporting (iCloud) Keychain and Safari credentials to a CSV file

Update (October 2021)

Exporting password + one-time code data from iCloud Keychain is now officially supported in macOS Monterey and Safari 15 (for Monterey, Big Sur, and Catalina). You can access it in the Password Manager’s “gear” icon (System Preferences > Passwords on Monterey, and Safari > Passwords everywhere else), or via the File > Export > Passwords... menu item). You shouldn't need to hack up your own exporter anymore.

Original, Obsolete Content (2014)

After my dad died, I wanted to be able to have access any of his online accounts going forward. My dad was a Safari user and used iCloud Keychain to sync his credentials across his devices. I don’t want to have to keep an OS X user account around just to access his accounts, so I wanted to export his credentials to a portable file.

This is the process I used to create a CSV file of his credentials in the format “example.com,user,pass”. This portable format would be pretty easy to import into 1Password or Safari in the future.

The way I went about this isn’t great; it opens up more opportunities for apps to control one’s Mac through Accessibility APIs, it writes plaintext passwords to disk, and it could use some cleaning up. A better approach might leverage the security command line tool that ships with OS X. That said, I found this method to be a fun illustration of what’s possible using AppleScript (or JavaScript!) and UI scripting on OS X.

Copy the iCloud Keychain into a local Keychain

One’s iCloud Keychain is stored on disk in a different format than a traditional keychain. To access the credentials, I first created a traditional keychain with the iCloud Keychain’s contents. To do this, I clicked File > New Keychain (⌥⌘N) in Keychain Access. In my case, I saved the new keychain to the desktop. I clicked on iCloud in the sidebar, selected all of the passwords, and copied them. I selected the new keychain I just created and pasted the passwords.

Screenshot of Keychain Access asking for the "Local Items" keychain password

Keychain Access prompted me for the “Local Items” keychain password for every password I was pasting. In my case, this would have been over 200 times!

Automating typing the keychain password and clicking “OK”

I ran the following script to take care of this:

-- Taken from a comment by Mr. X on http://selfsuperinit.com/2014/01/20/exporting-icloud-keychain-passwords-as-a-plain-text-file/
set keychainPassword to "keychain password"

tell application "System Events"
    repeat while exists (processes where name is "SecurityAgent")
        tell process "SecurityAgent"
            set value of text field 1 of window 1 to keychainPassword
            click button "OK" of window 1
        end tell
        delay 0.2
    end repeat
end tell

Whatever process is running this script (Script Editor or a standalone bundle), it’ll need permission to “control your computer”.

Screenshot Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility

After that runs, the recently-created local keychain should contain all of the passwords stored in iCloud Keychain.

Write all of the passwords from the keychain to a file

I grabbed a copy of Daniel Jalkut’s “Usable Keychain Scripting” utility to help with the next part, but someone more sane might turn to security.

I ran the following script to write the passwords out to disk:

set the logFile to ((path to desktop) as string) & "Passwords"
set keychainPath to "/Users/Dad/Desktop/dad.keychain"

-- write_to_file taken from http://www.macosxautomation.com/applescript/sbrt/sbrt-09.html
on write_to_file(this_data, target_file, append_data)
    try
        set the target_file to the target_file as string
        set the open_target_file to open for access file target_file with write permission
        if append_data is false then set eof of the open_target_file to 0
        write this_data to the open_target_file starting at eof
        close access the open_target_file
        return true
    on error
        try
            close access file target_file
        end try
        return false
    end try
end write_to_file

tell application "Usable Keychain Scripting"
    set keychainItems to get every keychain item of keychain keychainPath
    repeat with keychainItem in keychainItems
        set aServer to server in keychainItem
        set anAccount to account in keychainItem
        set aPassword to password in keychainItem

        set csvEntry to aServer & "," & anAccount & "," & aPassword & "
"

        my write_to_file(csvEntry, logFile, true)
    end repeat
end tell

There’s a lot that can be improved with this code. For instance, I could have used a consistent naming style between copied and non-copied code. If I took the time to look up an array or list "join" routine, the intent of the could could have been better communicated.

Here again, OS X’s Keychain wanted to do its job, prompting me to allow access for each of the 200+ items.

-- Taken from a comment by Mr. X on http://selfsuperinit.com/2014/01/20/exporting-icloud-keychain-passwords-as-a-plain-text-file/
tell application "System Events"
    repeat while exists (processes where name is "SecurityAgent")
        tell process "SecurityAgent"
            click button "Allow" of window 1
        end tell
        delay 0.2
    end repeat
end tell

After that, I had my file. Inelegant, but it got the job done, and I had fun.

@IvanExpert
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IvanExpert commented Aug 24, 2020

Just went through all of the above -- thank you for all of you especially @rmondello who've put work into figuring this out and commenting on it! Here's what I experienced:

  • The Get_Safari12_Passwords.applescript found in mrc-converter-suite works great under Safari 13.1.2 on Catalina 10.15.6. Very impressive, and this is probably the best and easiest solution for most people at this point, since the most important thing in most iCloud Keychains is web form passwords. (One hitch I ran into is that I had my Safari set to reopen windows from last session -- and if that meant no windows were open, the script wouldn't work. Once I made sure Safari had at least one window open, it ran fine.)

  • But I wanted to get all of my iCloud Keychain, including WiFi passwords, application passwords, etc. And I wanted it to stay as a keychain, rather than turn into a spreadsheet.

  • As others above observed, copying and pasting in Keychain Utility from the iCloud/Local Items keychain to a new keychain, using 10.13.4 and later, no longer works, apparently due to an Apple bug.*

  • Not having an older machine handy, I installed 10.11.6 into a Parallels VM.**

  • Once I got 10.11.6 up and running, I was able to load my iCloud Keychain, then turn it back into "Local Items" by signing out. From there I was able to Select All, Copy, Paste, as described in the original gist.

  • I then tried to use the AppleScript for the password entry -- we were talking almost 600 items. However, I'd occasionally hit an error (either an invalid parameters passed to function error, or a duplicate entry), and that would throw off the script. So I changed my user password in the El Cap VM to no password at all. Then I just held down the return key, pausing to press it to dismiss errors, then resuming holding it down. I zipped through it pretty quickly.

  • My new keychain appeared to be incomplete, but quitting and relaunching Keychain Utility resolved that. It contained about 578 of my 596 original entries, so I considered that to be good enough, and it seemed consistent with the number of errors that I hit.

Thanks again to @rmondello and all who commented here. I never would have gotten this done without you.

* As a workaround for copy-paste not working in 10.13.4+, I wonder if it's possible, using GUI scripting, to open each and every keychain entry and manually copy out all of its elements into a new entry. It would certainly be fragile. I'm not going to find out.

** Getting 10.11.6 running in a VM was a substantial challenge in and of itself, because while Apple lets you download it freely, what you get is an installation package, which installs the macOS Installer app that Parallels needs. But the package refuses to run on hardware that won't support it (i.e. a newer Mac). So I ended up having to install Catalina into Parallels (which is easy, because Parallels lets you install from the Recovery Disk automatically). From there, I could run the package installer in the El Capitan disk image, without concern for the underlying hardware. That got me an El Capitan Installer app, which I was able to copy to my host OS via file sharing, and Parallels was able to install 10.11.6 from that.

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ghost commented Nov 19, 2020

Can someone post a final code/script for Big Sur?

@recoi1er
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Can someone post a final code/script for Big Sur?

Does it not work for you in Big Sur?

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ghost commented Nov 19, 2020

Can someone post a final code/script for Big Sur?

Does it not work for you in Big Sur?

There's just so much information here that I don't quite understand how to put together into one script that I can run. I'm not really tech inclined.

@recoi1er
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Can someone post a final code/script for Big Sur?

Does it not work for you in Big Sur?

There's just so much information here that I don't quite understand how to put together into one script that I can run. I'm not really tech inclined.

The guide tells you exactly what to do, you don't need any tech inclination, just be able to read thoroughly. I suggest you read the entire read me as to what pertains to what you are trying to do and try it

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ghost commented Nov 19, 2020

Can someone post a final code/script for Big Sur?

Does it not work for you in Big Sur?

There's just so much information here that I don't quite understand how to put together into one script that I can run. I'm not really tech inclined.

The guide tells you exactly what to do, you don't need any tech inclination, just be able to read thoroughly. I suggest you read the entire read me as to what pertains to what you are trying to do and try it

There are several comments stating errors occurred even by just reading it thoroughly. And since no one has tried it yet with Big Sur, and it didn't work for me trying, I need to know workarounds or what to do. I'd be willing to hire someone to do it as this has been a big headache of mine with Apple.

@recoi1er
Copy link

Can someone post a final code/script for Big Sur?

Does it not work for you in Big Sur?

There's just so much information here that I don't quite understand how to put together into one script that I can run. I'm not really tech inclined.

The guide tells you exactly what to do, you don't need any tech inclination, just be able to read thoroughly. I suggest you read the entire read me as to what pertains to what you are trying to do and try it

There are several comments stating errors occurred even by just reading it thoroughly. And since no one has tried it yet with Big Sur, and it didn't work for me trying, I need to know workarounds or what to do. I'd be willing to hire someone to do it as this has been a big headache of mine with Apple.

I see, well start by not using the script at the top. This is what you need to use: https://1password.community/discussion/30286/mrcs-convert-to-1password-utility-mrc-converter-suite

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ghost commented Nov 19, 2020

Thanks. I much prefer remote assistance with this as I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll keep looking elsewhere I guess until someone is able to assist remotely. Appreciate your response.

@recoi1er
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Thanks. I much prefer remote assistance with this as I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll keep looking elsewhere I guess until someone is able to assist remotely. Appreciate your response.

You downloaded the package and read the guide thats in there? It seriously lays out exactly what you need to do. step. by. step.

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ghost commented Nov 19, 2020

Thanks. I much prefer remote assistance with this as I don't know what I'm doing, so I'll keep looking elsewhere I guess until someone is able to assist remotely. Appreciate your response.

You downloaded the package and read the guide thats in there? It seriously lays out exactly what you need to do. step. by. step.

No need to be rude. Some people prefer to do things with assistance. Have a good day.

@farialima
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This didn't work for me, my keychain must have been weirdly screwed up (didn't want to be exported...)

So instead I wrote a one-step script that does the whole work in one step -- see this gist

@rmondello
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Author

Hi y’all,

I wanted to let you know that exporting password + one-time code data from iCloud Keychain is now officially supported in macOS Monterey and Safari 15 (for Monterey, Big Sur, and Catalina). You can access it in the Password Manager’s “gear” icon (System Preferences > Passwords on Monterey, and Safari > Passwords everywhere else), or via the File > Export > Passwords... menu item).

I hope you’ll find the format to be reasonable!

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