Currently, MacOS has a bug where upon unlocking a Smartcard in Keychain.app will result in the padlock icon within system preferences to become frozen. You can no longer "click to unlock" the padlock to elevate to admin privileges within system preferences.
Internally, we have found that restarting securityd solves the "frozen" padlock, but with this restart comes lots of problems for the OS X.
Here is what we are talking about becoming frozen (see red circle):
Here is how we stopped and started securityd.
sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.securityd.plist
sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.securityd.plist
When this was completed, the padlock become functional again. However, we found the following problems after restart:
- The user can no longer wake from screensaver - the username/password dialogue will not appear for any wake event, keyboard or mouse move, resulting in a machine that will require a restart or force to login window
- You cannot unmount any shares or CD's/DVD's - any mounted shares will no longer unmount as a result of this securityd restart
- Some other minor issues were reported (which I did not experience), you can read them here in this Apple Community Thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3248969?start=60&tstart=5
It seems entirely possible that Apple would not like the restarting of securityd to take place, however, we have found that this is the only solution that works for resetting the padlock to a functional state. We have tried restarting pcdcd and that did not help and other tricks in lieu of restarting securityd.
We are looking for a safe restart process for securityd.
