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SSH Authentication Refused: Bad Ownership or Modes for Directory

If you get this error in your logs when trying to set up public key authenticated automatic logins, or while trying to SSH into your account, after setting up the public key the issue is related to permissions.

Tailing /var/log/secure on the target machine will be useful:

tail -f /var/log/secure
Dec 26 12:30:38 server sshd[3503454]: Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /home/user/.ssh

As you can see – bad ownership or modes for directory /home/user/.ssh.

SSH doesn’t like it if your home or ~/.ssh directories have group write permissions. Your home directory should be writable only by you, ~/.ssh should be 700, and authorized_keys should be 600 :

chmod go-w /home/user
chmod 700 /home/user/.ssh
chmod 600 /home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys

So fixing permissions is the way to go and have this error resolved.

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Updated on June 22, 2022

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Comments

  1. Can’t fucking do it… all the time the same crap message.

  2. Did something change in a recent version of ssh? I’ve been having a bugger of a time keeping authorized keys working without it suddenly stopping from working without anything changing in the config files or directory permissions.

  3. Thank you! Was googling for an hour before finding this.

  4. Me too ! I haved the error Permission denied (publickey) after each tentative to log with ssh with my server and finally I have seen the following logs “bad ownership or modes for directory /home/user” with the command : $ journalctl -b -u ssh.service
    And it solved the problem for me too after spending my afternoon on it today!

  5. This solved my issue – after spending so much time debugging and trying out other solutions.
    Thanks buddy!

  6. awesome! this fixed my issue for root logins with keys

  7. Thank you! chmod go-w ~/ fixed it for me after 1-2 hrs of changing .ssh/ and file permissions

  8. This solved the issue that made me lose an afternoon yesterday.

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