Sequoia: Keychain Access cannot create a new secure note

I am disappointed with the deprecation of creating new Keychain iCloud Secure Notes too. Will our old secured notes still be there? If so, I found that I can just reuse old notes. That seems to work for me (That is, supplementing old notes with new information).

HELP PLEASE! ! How do I get into my Secure Note? .... I have hundreds of PWs and records in Keychain /Secure Note that I can no longer access .!&^##*!!??! I read now this is related to my updating to Sequoia!!!! Without access to these PWs I am lost, blocked for work I need to do, and angry! BAH!

BruceH2013 wrote:

Hi DNoreen,

The answer to your question is in this thread already but Apple make it hard to find because, by default, they don't display the messages in order. :-(

Change to "sort by oldest" and then read through and you'll find your answer.

The default sort, order of highest rated, should provide the answer at the top. However, most people like to upvote the whining, not the solution as if that is somehow helpful.

Two solutions...

For storing extra info with a password; for example, the subscription key for the products associated with the login. In the new Passwords app you can edit a password entry--analogous to editing a contact. Locate the item and "edit" it. Then put info in the Notes field. https://www.idownloadblog.com/2022/04/29/how-to-add-notes-to-icloud-keychain-passwords/

For saving secure info that's not associated with a specific login. Create a Notes entry and lock it with a password. In the previous Keychain Access app you could have a password on a complete keychain. The same password protected all notes in the keychain. In Notes you could use the same password for each note in a group of secure notes. FYI, I chose to put these notes in iCloud so I could access them across my devices. To help find them I created a Notes folder for my "secure" notes.

Now to figure out how to export secure notes from Keychain Access. May be easy, just haven't looked.

Looks like one way and I've already started experimenting with it. But do note (see my comment above/below) that in the new Passwords app you can attach notes to a password--much like attaching notes to a Contacts app entry.

I actually like the Notes app so this is an easy transition for me. I keep a lot of, well, notes in Notes and Freeform. Both are compatible with the Apple Pencil on my iPad. (At least the second-gen Apple Pencil.)

Looks like it, just manually copied all my "Secure notes" from Keychain Access to Notes.

A bit frustrating but on the positive side they're more easily synched to my iOS devices.

Scared of loosing them if Apple suddenly decides to drop Keychain Access all together..

What I did was name the "password" entry as the name of the note (it doesn't seem to require a URL for the "password" entry. so I treated it like the title of the note.

if the note relates to something like a server, cert, GitHub repository or whatever I put in the account name and same for password.

now as this is a note not an actual account I could put anything in the account name and password just to get past the internal verifications of actually having an entry. but it's all bogus.

Then in the actual notes field I put my note sort of similar in a way to how you could create a secure note in keychain previously.

and I know for a fact this note will be always encrypted in transit and will be available to my phone and tablet.

and yes it could have been a bit clearer as to how to do all of this rather than simply say oh there is a new app and we moved a bunch of stuff to the new app and removed it from the old app; but we're keeping parts of the old app around just to create even more confusion.

I'm kind of late coming to this discussion, having just bought a new Airbook with Sequoia 15.2 installed. I haven't set up the new Password program yet. I'm scared, and have a few questions before I do that. 1) In that process, will it import ANY of my saved passwords that I have in Keychain Access? 2) And, I had a lot of Secure Notes (over 150). All this talk about KeyChain Access becoming extinct worries me. Sounds like I have to copy and paste them one at a time into the Notes program in order not to lose them eventually? 3) One final question, what should the settings be in iCloud? I turned a lot of program accesses off and stopped synching with my phone because I had was getting multiple duplicate phone numbers in Contacts on the iPhone. So, I really don't know how I should set up iCloud. Any tips? If this is too much, and I should split my questions up and repost as different topics, please let me know. Any help would be most appreciated.

@Barney: Thanks!

do you mean a locked note in the Notes.app? Is that strongly encrypted too?

I do have FileVault on of course, but locked notes are shared on all devices, I am wondering whether the level of encryption is as good as keychain access...

(Never mind.)

So is the proposed solution to use the notes app and secure the notes instead of using keychain?