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Today I went to push to my Github account and got an authentication error. Surprised, I looked in Keychain Access to see if there was anything wrong as I had setup git to use git-credential-osxkeychain. I freaked a little when I saw that there were no references to git at all. I went to log onto the GitHub site and found that my password wasn't working either. After calming down from a I've-been-hacked-panic-attack I saw that Github had sent me an email that they had to reset some users passwords due to an internal error. Annoying but OK.

Here's the question: Is it possible for a service like git-credential-osxkeychain to delete keys from a keychain? Could this have been done by Github from their end somehow?

I ask as I went back to my backups of my keychain file and the old Github key is in there, and I definitely didn't manually delete it.

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Yes, git-credential-osxkeychain can delete the GitHub entry in your KeyChain. It will do that when it gets a failed authentication, I've had it happen to me.

I'm not sure it's a good idea, but I understand the reason. It has the access to do it and it's not like it serves any purpose any more.

GitHub can't do it from their end, they don't have the permissions over your KeyChain.

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