Why is chmod 600 recommended on a public authorized_key??

May 11, 2016 13.6k views
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luismuzquiz
By:
luismuzquiz

When inserting (pasting) a public SSH key on a user’s folder, within a Droplet, Im seeing a lot of people urge to

chmod 700 ~/.ssh

and then to

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

But if i *chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys* with my user then i am not able to login via ssh, i need to change it to *chmod 755 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys* in order to connect.

Which leads to my question: Why is so important to have a public key under chmod 600??

And why im not being able to connect with chmod 600 but only with chmod 755?

Thanks in advanced

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1 Answer
luismuzquiz May 11, 2016

Ok to answer my own question i was not able to SSH with my user cause i needed to make sure
that user owned the files and folders and not root, with:

sudo chown -R user:user /home/user/.ssh

where user = myusername

But i still don’t understand why a public key needs chmod 0600

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