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

This is a particularly involved problem on Windows, where it's not enough to just chmod the files correctly. You have to set up your environment.

On Windows, this worked for me:

1. Install cygwin.

2. Replace the msysgit ssh.exe with cygwin's ssh.exe.

3. Using cygwin bash, chmod 600 the private key file, which was "id_rsa" for me.

4. If it still doesn't work, go to Control Panel -> System Properties -> Advanced -> Environment Variables and add the following environment variable. Then repeat step 3.
   
   Variable      Value
   CYGWIN      sbmntsec