SSH Permission Denied, despite having public key in authorized keys file

One of the things on my to do was to move away from plain text authentication on this website’s server.

2 advantages to this:

1. Rsync-ing files is easy - I don’t have to type in password.
2. It is more secure.

To disable plain text password, edit /etc/ssh/sshd_config/ and set PasswordAuthentication no.

I was prompted user@server_ip: Permission denied (publickey). despite having the public key in the authorized_keys file. SSH-ing using password was working though. Every time I sat to figure this out I quickly gave up because I couldn’t spot anything obvious.

Today I finally perserved on this by not doing “samething over and over and expecting different results”. Rather turned on my developer-debugger hat.

First of starting from the first.

1. I deleted the authorized_keys file and recreated it.
2. Ran the ssh-copy-id and ensured that I copied the right public key file.

But that didn’t work.

Next I set the debug flag to see if that would lead me on the right path ssh user@server-ip -vvvv

Alas that too was a dead end!

Reading more on SO, I checked to see if ~/.ssh and ~/.ssh/authorized_keys had the right permissions. And it did! Onething I overlooked was the home folder itself.

There were 2 issues one was that I did something and the home folder for the user wasn’t owned by that user Strange right? /Abhinav is wondering what was I thinking or why did I do this? Next was the permission, I read in a SO post that this is the right permissions for the folders

/home/user -> 700
/home/user/.ssh -> 600/644
/home/user/.ssh/authorize_keys -> 600/644

This fixed the issue for me.