What is this mystery certificate?
QI stumbled upon a new security certificate that has recently appeared in my keychain. Its name starts with ‘member:’, after which there are lots of capital letters and digits. Where has that come from, and is it safe to remove it? byColIn ely
AThis mystery certificate has appeared in the login keychains of many – perhaps all – Macs on which the macOS 10.14.4 update has been installed, and was placed there during or shortly after that.
The letters and digits in its name are two universal identifiers (UUIDs). Apple uses these extensively to identify events and objects in macOS, but their use doesn’t appear to be personal or sensitive in this context. It’s a dummy certificate for a new service that runs
in the background, named studentd, which was enabled on Macs with that update, and is part of Apple’s newly extended Classroom software for people using Macs and iPads in teaching. The same update also created a new folder at /Users/[yourname]/Library/studentd.
Until your Mac is restarted after installing that system update, you may also see the new studentd process listed as running according to Activity Monitor, but once you have started your Mac up again that should disappear.
Your Mac shouldn’t need that certificate, unless it’s part of a teaching network controlled by Apple Classroom. It should be safe to delete the certificate if you want to, although another one could be generated in its place. No one knows whether this was a minor bug in the macOS update, or if it’ll be used by a new feature in the future.