Plainnotes

Key authentication still asking for a password

2026-03-04 · 2 min readSystems

authorized_keys is in place, ssh -i points at the key, and it still asks for a password. ssh -vvv shows Offering public key followed by Authentications that can continue.

Usually one of four things. Permissions: ~/.ssh must be 700, authorized_keys 600, and the home directory must not be group- or world-writable — sshd silently ignores files that are too open and logs only Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes.

Or PubkeyAuthentication no, or AuthorizedKeysFile pointing elsewhere. Or SELinux contexts (CentOS): restorecon -Rv ~/.ssh. Or AllowUsers does not include the account you are using.