"Unable to obtain authorization for this operation" when trying to reset my default keychain

I've not been able to save new passwords to my keychain lately.

In addition, I can't view any of my passwords. I'll open Keychain Access, pick a login entry, click the Show Password checkbox, and enter my account password. When I do this, I get an error message:

This is really weird considering my account is an Admin user:

Keychain Access isn't my main password repository so I don't really care if I need to reset it. I tried going into Keychain Access to reset my default keychain.

When I do this I receive the error message:

Like I said, I'm an admin for my computer. There is another admin account that was setup when this computer was imaged, but that account shouldn't own my keychain, right?!

I tried looking for Keychain First Aid but apparently that's been removed.

I'm running 10.12.4.

Any ideas of what's going on and/or how to fix it?

Solution 1:

I was able to fix this issue by restarting my computer in recovery mode and using disk utility's First Aid to repair all volumes and the disk itself. I don't know which repair actually fixed the issue, but when I restarted I was able to view and save items in my keychain.

You can enter recovery mode by restarting your computer and holding down the keys command and r. Once you're in recovery mode you can select "Disk Utility" to get to the First Aid tool.

Once you're here you can click on each of the volumes (the indented names on the left. E.g. Macintosh HD) and then click the First Aid button.

I repaired both of my volumes and the disk itself (the APPLE SSD SM...). The first aids for the volumes and the disk itself do different things.

After you're done, restart your computer and try to use/view your keychain. Cross your fingers and hope you don't have to do more googling!

Solution 2:

Running Disk Util also fixed this exact same problem for me. I have 10.12.6 that was working fine, until I came in to work one morning and suddenly nothing worked - Box and several other services kept demanding authentication and failing, claiming they could not access keychain. Trying to reset keychain resulted in same problems shown above in this post. Surprisingly, Disk Utility fixed it all.