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

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 right now I'm not being allowed permission into Panda's EC2 instance. Getting Started with Panda

I'm getting the following error:

@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @

Permissions 0644 for '~/.ec2/id_rsa-gsg-keypair' are too open.
It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.

I've chmoded my keypair to 600 in order to get into my personal instance last night, and experimented at length setting the permissions to 0 and even generating new key strings, but nothing seems to be working.

Any help at all would be a great help!

Hm, it seems as though unless permissions are set to 777 on the directory, the ec2-run-instances script is unable to find my keyfiles. I'm new to SSH so I might be overlooking something.

Solution 1:

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!

Solution 2:

Make sure that the directory containing the private key files is set to 700

chmod 700 ~/.ec2

Solution 3:

To fix this,

you’ll need to reset the permissions back to default:
```
sudo chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa
sudo chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub
```
If you are getting another error:
- Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
- Failed to add the host to the list of known hosts (/home/geek/.ssh/known_hosts).
This means that the permissions on that file are also set incorrectly, and can be adjusted with this:
```
sudo chmod 644 ~/.ssh/known_hosts
```

Finally, you may need to adjust the directory permissions as well:
```
sudo chmod 755 ~/.ssh
```

This should get you back up and running.

Solution 4:

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

Solution 5:

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