03 Apr 2020 | Using CAC with Mac OS Catalina and Safari

After spending an unbelievable amount of time trying to get this working, I figured I’d throw together some steps to help anyone else out.

1. For Catalina, you need to uninstall all 3rd party CAC enablers. You can do that by following these instructions
2. Apple also gave the following guidance which I followed.
3. I was never able to pair my smart card to the OS, until I found this article. The important command here was sc_auth pairing_ui -s enable which started pairing. After this, I was able to login to the OS using my CAC.
4. Lastly, I blew away all certs in my keychain - this seems to play an important role. You can find these by pressing command + space and launching “Keychain Access”. Under login > Certificates - I had a bunch of crap. I blew away the entire folder, then from scratch, followed Step 5 from these instructions

After that, nothing changed until I rebooted, at which point I was finally able to get a cert prompt and CAC in to DoD websites.

Hopefully this helps someone.