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I'm trying to use ssh to log in to AWS from OSX Mavericks and having a hell of a time:

I enter:

ssh -i ~/.ssh/filename.pem [email protected] -v

And I get this, as well as a keychain popup that asks for a password, even though there is none to give...

debug1: key_parse_private_pem: PEM_read_PrivateKey failed
debug1: read PEM private key done: type <unknown>
Saving password to keychain failed.

I launched a new instance on AWS and generated a new key pair. When I left the .pem file unprotected, the OSX keychain popup didn't appear, but I was unable to access AWS because the file was unprotected:

Permissions 0644 for '/Users/cvn/.ssh/chris-test.pem' are too open. It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others. This private key will be ignored. bad permissions: ignore key: /Users/cvn/.ssh/chris-test.pem Permission denied (publickey).

So I ran

chmod 400 chris-test.pem

and the Keychain returned asking for a password that I do not have...

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  • What command did you use to generate your key pair? Are you sure you didn't protect the private key .pem with a password? It's bad form to store private keys unencrypted, so you probably did give it a password.
    – Spiff
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 4:17
  • On second thought, from that error message, maybe it's trying to store your private key in your OS X keychain, but your keychain is locked so it needs your keychain password to unlock it so it can store your private key there.
    – Spiff
    Commented Jun 3, 2015 at 4:21
  • Hi Spiff - Thanks for the ideas. I've tried fixing this (see above) and no luck so far...
    – Chris
    Commented Jun 8, 2015 at 22:42
  • Figured this out. It was a screwed RSA file. Thanks for the help.
    – Chris
    Commented Jun 18, 2015 at 22:47

1 Answer 1

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I had this issue when I by mistake used public key instead of private one.

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