SSH Private Key Permissions using Git GUI or ssh-keygen are too open

Question

Recently I\'ve been unable to clone or push to github, and I\'m trying to find the root cause.

This is on windows

I have cygwin + git as well as msy

Answer 1

I'm on XP and this allowed Git Bash to communicate w/ Github (after much frustration):

1. copy c:\cygwin\bin\cyg* (~50 files) to c:\Program Files\Git\bin\
2. copy c:\cygwin\bin\ssh.exe to c:\Program Files\Git\bin\ (overwriting)

3. Create the file c:\Documents and Settings\\.ssh\config containing:

   Host github.com
       User git
       Hostname github.com
       PreferredAuthentications publickey
       IdentityFile "/cygdrive/c/Documents and Settings//.ssh/id_rsa"
   

4. (optional) Use ssh -v git@github to see the connection debugged.

5. Try a push!

Background: The general problem is a combination of these two:

• BUG: mingw32 sees all files as 644 (other/group-readable), and nothing I tried in mingw32, cygwin, or Windows could fix it.
• mingw32's SSH version won't allow that for private keys (generally a good policy in a server).