Apple Keychain
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Keychains were initially developed for Apple's e-mail system, PowerTalk. Among its many features, PowerTalk incorporated a powerful encryption system for security and digital signatures. 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. Keychain placed these passwords in an encrypted file, and automatically returned them on command if the file was "opened" using a password.
This offered excellent security not found on other platforms; the passwords were not easily retriveable due to the encryption, yet the simplicity of the interface allowed the user to select a different password for every system withouth fear of forgetting them, as a single password would open the file and return them all. At the time, this was a truly innovative concept that was not available on other platforms. Keychain was one of the few parts of PowerTalk that was obviously useful "on its own", which suggested it should be promoted to become a part of the basic MacOS. But due to internal politics, it was kept inside the PowerTalk system, and therefore available to very few Mac users.
It was not until the return of Steve Jobs that Keychain was liberated from the now-dead PowerTalk. By this point in time the concept was no longer so unique, but it was still rare to see a keychain system that was not associated with a particular piece of software, typically a web browser. Keychain became a standard part of OS 9, and was included in OS X in the first commercial versions.
Third party uptake of keychain has been somewhat spotty to date. Although most Apple software uses it (notably Apple Mail and Safari), and Macintosh-only applications such as Transmit and Camino do as well, cross-platform applications such as Firefox do not use Keychain, sticking to custom cross-platform solutions instead. Many programs continue to store their login credentials in plain text files, although this is becoming rare for newer programs.
| Applications |
|---|
| Apple File Security · Calculator · Chooser · Drive Setup · DVD Player · Finder · Graphing Calculator · Keychain Access · PictureViewer · QuickTime Player · Sherlock · Software Update · Stickies · Apple System Profiler · SimpleText |
| Developer |
| MacsBug · Macintosh Programmer's Workshop · ResEdit |
| Technology |
| ⌘ · ⌥ · AppleScript · Code Fragment Manager · Creator code · Hierarchical File System · HFS Plus · Keychain · Macintosh File System · QuickTime · Resource fork · Type code |
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