Keychain Access hangs after update to 10.7.2. Any help?

Question

I recently updated to OSX 10.7.2 and can no longer open the Keychain Access app. It hangs on startup. A side effect of this is that I can no longer access my department's WPA Enterprise network as network preferences cannot access the certificates stored in the keychain.
Please help!

Answer 1

Hello,
We are finding the same solution seems to work for the time being with our systems at the University I work at.
However, it is not ideal because it stops the Keychain from checking whether or not a certificate has been expired or revoked. The two settings, OSCP and CRL are both methods to make sure a certificate is still valid and should be trusted by checking up the chain to the issuer. If the issuer is on the internet and you are stuck in a captive portal then how can you check? I think Lion is getting into a catch 22 here.
You can set these values in the command line using the following:
To set the CRL settings:
defaults write com.apple.security.revocation CRLStyle -string OFF
To set the OCSP settings:
defaults write com.apple.security.revocation OCSPStyle -string OFF
The next time my test machine beachballs while trying to launch Keychain access, I am going to try this as a quick workaround myself. We are seeing a continual stream of students coming into our HelpDesk with this problem and the fixes above only work for a short period of time. Then it all breaks again.
I have our network security people looking into allowing the certificate checks for our systems to go even from the captive portal.  I will report back any success or failure as a workaround for this method.
Having to set machines to not check for revokation of certificates seems like one more step closer to just throwing put the whole trusted certificate idea as a usable security method.