Private key too open but ssh-add still prompts for passphrase

Greg Lambert glemtp at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 28 04:53:02 EST 2003


I am working on a port of openssh-3.5p1 and ran across a case where we were trying to load a private key with 0644 permissions into the agent.  The agent responds with:
 
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0644 for '/home/greg/.ssh/id_dsa' are too open.
It is recommended that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
bad permissions: ignore key: /home/greg/.ssh/id_dsa
Enter passphrase for /home/greg/.ssh/id_dsa:

Which is fine except why is it prompting for the passphrase if the key is being ignored?
And if I put in the correct passphrase for that key it prints the warning again then says "Bad passphrase, try again"  It keeps prompting repeatedly until no passphrase is entered or I ctrl-C out.  
I looked in the archives and in bugzilla but I can't seem to find this problem.  Can someone shed some light on this.  Is this a known bug?
 
Greg Lambert
 
 
 
 


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