Using special character as password for keychain via security

Question

Created Oct ’24

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I am trying to set up a KeyChain password using the security in my macOS terminal, and it happens that the special characters are encoded and not set to the keychain as it is rather encoded..

When I run this

security add-generic-password -a comp -s example -w 'ã!¼àÁu' -T ""

There will be no error but when the password is called back it is encoded with the something like below

c3a321c2bcc3a0c38175

Does anybody know how i can achieve using this kind of characters without security encoding it as it currently does?

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Oct ’24

Recommended

That looks right to me. THe first character in your example is ã, or U+00E3 LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH TILDE. Its UTF-8 encoding is C3 A3, which is the prefix of the result you’re seeing.

What are you actually trying to do here? Keep in mind that a generic password items doesn’t store a string but rather data. If you supply a string on the command line, the security tool has to do some sort of text encoding conversion, to get a data value from the string. It’s chosen to do UTF-8 conversion, which is a good choice IMO.

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Answer 2

EzimoPrince OP

Oct ’24

@DTS Engineer Thank you so much for the response. What I was specifically looking for was to get back exactly this ã!¼àÁu from the security when i call it.

Example Setting

security add-generic-password -a comp -s example -w 'ã!¼àÁu' -T ""

Getting

security find-generic-password -a comp -s example -w
// Should be ã!¼àÁu
// But instead it's c3a321c2bcc3a0c38175

Solution

This is what i ended up doing to convert the response from security back to the original characters

security find-generic-password -a comp -s example -w | xxd -p -r | rev | cut -c 1- | rev
// ã!¼àÁu

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