Apple provides us a unified way to store your passwords: iCloud Keychain. Using Shared Web Credentials, iOS apps can take the advantage of iCloud Keychain as well.

But what if you are using Chrome and Safari at the same time? If you use auto-generated password by Safari, you have to go to preferences and do some copy-and-paste job. And vice versa.

After searching through all the sites, I found a way to achieve this, but still experiencing some issues. Safari stores passwords according to their domains, but Chrome stores passwords according to their exact filled-in URLs. That makes the synchronization nearly impossible. Personally I prefer the Safari-way. Chrome used to have a flag, but in recent versions, they got disappeared.

In this article, I will focus on how to export and import these passwords and left yourself dealing with the URL part. Same solution also works on Firebox, LastPass and 1Password.

  1. Download keychaindump from GitHub and compile it using OpenSSL

brew install openssl

&&

gcc -I /usr/local/opt/openssl/include -L /usr/local/opt/openssl/lib keychaindump.c -o keychaindump -lcrypto -lssl

  1. Disable SIP if you are using El Capitan or later macOS.

Reboot with Command + R and enter csrutil disable; reboot

  1. Create a new keychain and encrypted it with your login password, use copy / paste to populate the new keychain with all records from iCloud into the new keychain. Paste records into your new-created keychain.

In my case, it is critical to store the new-created keychain under the default directory: ~/Library/Keychains/

Then comes hardest part. Either one endures the maddening series of entering the keychain password and clicking ‘OK’ many times in a row, or editing and learning to use the AppleScript provided by another forum user. I chose the latter, and repeat the script here for completeness:

Open ‘Script Editor’ in macOS, paste the above code, replace password with your login password and play.

  1. Dump the passwords using keychaindump

Open ‘Keychain Access’ and ensure your new-created keychain is unlocked.

sudo keychaindump ~/Library/Keychains/NEW_KEYCHAIN_NAME.keychain

  1. Select / Save your passwords and process it with the underlying script. (Optional)

The CSV file is now suitable for importing.

  1. Enable Chrome password import feature by entering chrome://flags/#password-import-export, then restart the browser.

  2. Import password, re-enable SIP

Reboot with Command + R and enter csrutil enable; reboot

  1. Cleanup your plaintext password files!

References