Macos – Can’t import public key into OSX Keychain

keychainmacosopensslprivate-keypublic-key

I created a couple of self-signed S/MIME certificates (using OSX Keychain & OpenSSL) and then exported these into 3 files:

  • Certificate (.cer)
  • Private Key (.p12)
  • Public Key (.pem)

When attempting to import these back into another Mac, the Certificate and Private Key imported without any issues. But the Public Key can't be imported.

Instead I get the following error message:

An error has occurred. Unable to import an item.

The contents of this time cannot be retrieved

Screenshot of OSX Keychain error when importing Public Key

How can I import the public key? Should it be converted to another format for import?

Best Answer

Its a bug in OSX. You can import from the command line as per this answer:

https://stackoverflow.com/a/11979625/59198

The command is:

security import pub_key.pem -k ~/Library/Keychains/login.keychain

You'll then need to rename the key in keychain.app

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