Add certificates to macOS

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
May 22, 2025
5 replies
434 views

We get the following error when trying to add a trusted certificate to the keychain from terminal:

SecCertificateAddToKeychain: Write permissions error

We’ve tried with sudo and with that we get the following error after being prompted by the OS for an admin user name and password:

SecTrustSettingsSetTrustSettings: The authorization was denied.

Any insights into how we can add certificates to the keystore would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

Best answer by Paulo144

@mlajoie i don’t think so, unless you use jamf or another mdm solution to input this certificate directly instead of doing manually.

As stated on KB0022296

“The EPM-M product cannot intercept prompts for private keys related to System Certificates. Apple OS security does not provide a way for third-party products like EPM-M to interact with certain prompts from Keychain.

For certificate deployment, it's recommended to use an MDM such as Jamf or Intune.”

Paulo144

Veteran

@mlajoie try to use the JIT admin option, that should do the trick.

I believe apple has changes the necessary permissions to work on the local certificates and EPM can’t target that anymore.

Pulitros

M

mlajoieAuthor

Trailblazer

this is a good idea. unfortunately, JIT admin isn’t an option for us right now. any other way other than that?

Paulo144Answer

Veteran

@mlajoie i don’t think so, unless you use jamf or another mdm solution to input this certificate directly instead of doing manually.

As stated on KB0022296

“The EPM-M product cannot intercept prompts for private keys related to System Certificates. Apple OS security does not provide a way for third-party products like EPM-M to interact with certain prompts from Keychain.

For certificate deployment, it's recommended to use an MDM such as Jamf or Intune.”

Pulitros