SSH Bad Owner Or Permissions Error

21st January 2013 - 2 minutes read time

After a recent update on Ubuntu I found that I was unable to use ssh due to a strange permissions error to do with the ssh config file. This was quite a problem as I wasn't able to push changes to my git server. The error was as follows:

$ ssh hostname
Bad owner or permissions on ~/.ssh/config

All that was needed was for my user only to have read and write permissions to the ssh config file. The following command fixed things for me.

chmod 600 ~/.ssh/config

If that doesn't solve things for you then you might need to also make sure that the correct user is associated with the config file.

chown user:user ~/.ssh/config
linux

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