WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! when trying to SSH into Amazon EC2 Instance

Question

I\'m working to set up Panda on an Amazon EC2 instance. I set up my account and tools last night and had no problem using SSH to interact with my own personal instance, but

Answer 1

I also got the same issue, but I fix it by changing my key file permission to 600.

sudo chmod 600 /path/to/my/key.pem

Link : http://stackabuse.com/how-to-fix-warning-unprotected-private-key-file-on-mac-and-linux/

Answer 2

Keep your private key, public key, known_hosts in same directory and try login as below:

ssh -I(small i) "hi.pem" ec2-user@ec2-**-***-**-***.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com

• Same directory in the sense, cd /Users/prince/Desktop. Now type ls command and you should see **.pem **.ppk known_hosts

Note: You have to try to login from the same directory or you'll get a permission denied error as it can't find the .pem file from your present directory.

---

If you want to be able to SSH from any directory, you can add the following to you ~/.ssh/config file...

Host your.server
HostName ec2-user@ec2-**-***-**-***.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com
User ec2-user
IdentityFile ~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair
IdentitiesOnly yes

Now you can SSH to your server regardless of where the directory is by simply typing ssh your.server (or whatever name you place after "Host").

Answer 3

I've chmoded my keypair to 600 in order to get into my personal instance last night,

And this is the way it is supposed to be.

From the EC2 documentation we have "If you're using OpenSSH (or any reasonably paranoid SSH client) then you'll probably need to set the permissions of this file so that it's only readable by you." The Panda documentation you link to links to Amazon's documentation but really doesn't convey how important it all is.

The idea is that the key pair files are like passwords and need to be protected. So, the ssh client you are using requires that those files be secured and that only your account can read them.

Setting the directory to 700 really should be enough, but 777 is not going to hurt as long as the files are 600.

Any problems you are having are client side, so be sure to include local OS information with any follow up questions!

Answer 4

Just a note for anyone who stumbles upon this:

If you are trying to SSH with a key that has been shared with you, for example:

ssh -i /path/to/keyfile.pem user@some-host

Where keyfile.pem is the private/public key shared with you and you're using it to connect, make sure you save it into ~/.ssh/ and chmod 777.

Trying to use the file when it was saved elsewhere on my machine was giving the OP's error. Not sure if it is directly related.

Answer 5

The private key file should be protected. In my case i have been using the public_key authentication for a long time and i used to set the permission as 600 (rw- --- ---) for private key and 644 (rw- r-- r--) and for the .ssh folder in the home folder you will have 700 permission (rwx --- ---). For setting this go to the user's home folder and run the following command

Set the 700 permission for .ssh folder

chmod 700 .ssh

Set the 600 permission for private key file

chmod 600 .ssh/id_rsa

Set 644 permission for public key file

chmod 644 .ssh/id_rsa.pub