SSH Keys: Fixing the warning ‘UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!’
1 min readFeb 2, 2015
During migration from one Mac to another, I copied my ssh keys and I’m faced with a problem. I’ve seen the next warning, when I did commands ‘fetch’, ‘push’, ‘pull’… for my repositories.
Full text of the warning you can see below:
To fix this, you’ll need to reset the permissions 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 set incorrectly, and can be fixed with the next:
sudo chmod 644 ~/.ssh/known_hosts
And you should to adjust the directory permissions:
sudo chmod 755 ~/.ssh
That’s all. Now you can use your SSH keys without any errors or warnings.