routined wants to use the "Local Items" keychain alert

Today I updated my Mac from Mac OS X Mountain Lion to macOS High Sierra. After I log into my account I immediately see this message:

"routined wants to use the "Local Items" keychain"

I tried to use my Mac account’s local password, but the alert did not disappear.

What is Routine? How do I resolve this?

Solution 1:

Did you change your password recently? Probable solution that worked for me:

1. Go to the app "Keychain Access".

2. From the side-bar, go to "login".

3. Click on "Edit" menu from the menu bar and choose "Change Password for Keychain "Login"..."

4. Enter the old password of your user account in the Current Password field. This is the password you were using before the password was reset.

5. Enter the new password of your user account in the New Password field. This is the password you're now using to log in to your Mac. Enter the same password in the Verify field.

6. Click OK, and exit the Keychain Access program.

In my experience, this would happen if you recently changed your system password. Since your login keychain relies on the password to be able to access the credentials, it keeps popping you the question.

Source: Apple

Solution 2:

I had this problem too. This was my solution:

• Open terminal
• cd ~/Library/Keychains
• ls
• locate the file that looks something like this: 94ED610F-DD96-4ECF-A2BC-7D2F8651A464 (yours will be different)
• rm -rf 94ED610F-DD96-4ECF-A2BC-7D2F8651A464 (whatever your file is called)
• reboot your Mac.

Solution 3:

I just got this message today (I upgraded to High Sierra a couple weeks ago), and was also concerned about possible maliciousness. I'm not sure why routined needs access to the Local Items keychain, but I figured I'd document here what I've figured out so far:

• Selecting cancel doesn't seem to have caused any problems, so I'd recommend that, rather than risking opening up your keychain unnecessarily.
• routined seems to be involved in tracking recent location information.
  • I did just travel for the holidays, so something location based might explain why I'm only seeing it now.
• Looking at running processes named routined and running strings on the binary didn't reveal anything malicious-looking (not a definitive examination, I know, but it's a start).

Other than that, my research was unfortunately mostly a dead end. All the links seemed to be references to the process's cache which includes tracking information, and all my google results seemed to be re-iterations (i.e. copy and pastes) from work by Sarah Edwards, who has a blog called Mac4n6.com. She has a "Contact Me" page, and I've reached out with a query for more information on this topic.

Other than that, hopefully someone more knowledgeable than myself will chime in. The only advice I can glean from other similar issues with keychain prompting users like this is the unfortunately unhelpful advice to try restarting the computer, recreating the user account, or re-installing the OS, none of which actually address the actual issue.