MacOS – Strange looking certificate in macOS Keychain

certificatekeychainmacosSecurity

I need help with a strange looking certificate which has appeared in the Keychain of my Mac.

The name of the certificate is "A9936B80-41C7-4D34-8020-59C3E40A31A8 A98369B2-0C8C-4CF8-9921-015C5D9A4C86". It is installed in the login keychain under My Certificates. There is no clear name of an issuer, nor to whom it was issued.

It is not trusted by the system and after deleting it gets reinstalled again and again.

What it is?

Best Answer

I found a plausible explanation, the certificate is most probably related to studentd, see https://eclecticlight.co/2019/04/01/back-to-school-studentd-and-classroom-in-mojave-10-14-4/:

Although run from a system LaunchAgent property list, studentd is run as the user from login. If you log into a user account which doesn’t yet have one, it creates a security certificate in that user’s login keychain, with a name starting with ‘member:’ followed by two UUIDs. The first of these is that user’s UserIdentifier given in ~/Library/studentd/AdHocConfiguration.plist, thus is that student’s identifier for the purposes of studentd. That certificate isn’t trusted, but trust is obtained later if the user connects that Mac to a Classroom system.

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