How To Fix SSH Automatic Connection Problems

I was doing something very simple - connecting to my own machine (with ssh) without using password. That should be simple right?

I dutifully appended my id_dsa.pub to authorized_keys and expected that it would work. It didn’t. After pouring over /etc/sshd_config for several minutes I came up blank. My only option was to look in the log file ( /var/log/secure ). I found this strange error:

Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for file /home/angsuman/.ssh/authorized_keys

The permissions for the file was 644. That was the problem. I just had to change it to 600 to fix the problem. This is a not so well-known security feature in ssh.