Permissions on SSH causing problems

Question

I am trying to SSH from my local machine to my server. In the past I haven’t had to enter a password because my public key was on the server in authorized_keys. However, today I think some permissions have been changed on some files and it’s asking for a password every time I try to SSH.

What are the correct/default permissions for the .ssh folder and its contents on my local machine/server?

Here are my current permissions

My server

[root@server9987 .ssh]# ls -la
total 24
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Oct 17 03:29 .
drwxr-x--- 7 root root 4096 Oct 17 03:29 ..
-rw------- 1 root root  397 Oct 16 19:11 authorized_keys
-rw------- 1 root root 1675 Oct 12 02:10 id_rsa
-rw------- 1 root root  398 Oct 12 02:10 id_rsa.pub
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root  830 Oct 17 03:29 known_hosts

My local machine

➜  .ssh  l
total 32
drwx------  6 Oliver  staff   204 17 Oct 00:28 .
drwxr-xr-x  7 Oliver  staff   238 16 Oct 17:28 ..
-rw-------  1 Oliver  staff   332 16 Oct 17:28 config
-rw-------  1 Oliver  staff  1766 13 Jul 11:13 id_rsa
-rw-------  1 Oliver  staff   398 13 Jul 11:13 id_rsa.pub
-rw-------  1 Oliver  staff  3312 17 Oct 00:28 known_hosts

Answer 1

You want the private key to be readable by the owner alone. It's generally a good idea to make everything in that folder readable and writable only by the owner. However, the file which allows others to login via a key must be readable by the user who is running the ssh daemon.

generally:

find ~/.ssh -type f -exec chmod 600 {} \;
chmod 755 ~/.ssh
chmod 644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

Update Default permissions for the ~/.ssh folder are 700 (openssh 5.9, gentoo) and some files:

$ ll .ssh; ll -d .ssh
-rw-r--r-- 1 jaroslav jaroslav 406 Oct 17 04:32 known_hosts
drwx------ 2 jaroslav jaroslav 4096 Oct 17 04:32 .ssh
-rw------- 1 jaroslav jaroslav 1766 Oct 17 04:37 id_rsa
-rw------- 1 jaroslav jaroslav  395 Oct 17 04:37 id_rsa.pub

This is after moving my original .ssh away and running ssh hostname.org; ssh-keygen. The files created by the openssh commands seem to be unaffected by umask

So I'm still right, and the comments/down-votes have nothing on my answer :'(.

The reason why .ssh can be 700 is because sshd is mostly run by root who can read whatever she wants no matter what. The reason sshd is mostly run by root is because the daemon needs to listen on a privileged port (<1024).

Answer 2

Found the answer over in this thread. It wasn’t the permissions on the SSH files/folders, rather it was the permission of the user directory.