Keychain (software)

Password management system in macOS Keychain is a password management system developed by Apple for macOS. It was introduced with Mac OS 8.6, and was included in all subsequent versions of the operating system, as well as in iOS. A keychain can contain various types of data: passwords (for websites, FTP servers, SSH accounts, network shares, wireless networks, groupware applications, encrypted disk images), private keys, certificates, and secure notes. Some data, primarily passwords, in the Keychain are visible and editable using a user-friendly interface in Passwords, a built in app in macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 and available in System Settings/Settings in earlier versions of Apple's operating systems. History Keychains were initially developed for Apple's e-mail system, PowerTalk, in the early 1990s. Among its many features, PowerTalk used plug-ins that allowed mail to be retrieved from a wide variety of mail servers and online services. The keychain concept naturally "fell out" of this code, and was used in PowerTalk to manage all of a user's various login credentials for the various e-mail systems PowerTalk could connect to. The passwords were not easily retrievable due to the en