securityd goes nuts every 4 minutes & 30 seconds

securityd spams my console with the following :

19/04/2012 16:23:17.405 com.apple.securityd: Value of bTransmit: 00000001

repeated 563 times (after disabling the default mps_limit of 500).

4 minutes and 30 seconds later (give or take a couple of seconds), it does it all over again. Oddly, the message is split over that boundary :

04/05/2012 09:32:16.092 com.apple.securityd: Value of bTransmit: 00000001
04/05/2012 09:32:16.092 com.apple.securityd: Value of bTransmit: 00000001
04/05/2012 09:32:16.092 com.apple.securityd: Value 
04/05/2012 09:36:19.470 com.apple.securityd: of bTransmit: 00000001
04/05/2012 09:36:19.470 com.apple.securityd: Value of bTransmit: 00000001
04/05/2012 09:36:19.470 com.apple.securityd: Value of bTransmit: 00000001

It's pretty annoying. Anyone know what causes it, or what bTransmit might be? There seems to be no mention of it on Google.

Solution 1:

Are you using a smartcard reader or some other kind of security related hardware? Seems like this is an error in a kernel extension or driver for some piece of security hardware.

Solution 2:

You are facing a continuous flow of information messages. This flow is truncated by chunck of 500, which is the default value of mps_limit in /etc/asl.conf. This means that your flow of security related messages is at a rate > 500 / s. This is huge.

Could you open:

/var/log/secure.log
/var/log/kernel.log

and check which message could be related with this continuous flow of information messages?

Could you type the following command (in an xterm or Terminal window):

top -o msgsent

to check if the culprit could be a local process and tracked down through its huge level of messages sent? You will have to enlarge your window to more than 152 characters large to see the film.