How to find culprit when stuck in SecureInput mode?

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Created Mar ’23

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Sometimes, a Mac gets stuck in secure keyboard input mode, which prevents event taps from working. Googling indicates that this is a perennial intermittent problem. I've seen the suggestion to find the responsible process by using the command line

ioreg -l -w 0 | grep SecureInput

and looking for a PID in the output. When this happened to me today, the PID was that of the loginwindow process. That seems to be a bogus "I don't really know" result. In my case, quitting Safari cleared the problem. But is there any better way to find out the real source of the problem than quitting apps one by one?

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Answer 1

DTS Engineer OP

Apple

Mar ’23

Accepted Answer

But is there any better way to find out the real source of the problem … ?

No.

I researched this in depth for a DTS incident last year and my conclusion was that the APIs underlying the secure input mechanism are in desperate need of an update (r. 89142297)-: As part of that research I looked into the undocumented I/O Registry mechanism used by various third-party apps to track who’s responsible for secure input being enabled. That mechanism is ‘best effort’. There are numerous situations where it won’t produce accurate results.

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Quinn “The Eskimo!” @ Developer Technical Support @ Apple
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Answer 2

JWWalker OP

Mar ’23

Thanks, Quinn!

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