Why do I get "Permission denied (publickey)" when trying to SSH from local Ubuntu to a Amazon EC2 server?
Solution 1:
The first thing to do in this situation is to use the -v option to ssh, so you can see what types of authentication is tried and what the result is. Does that help enlighten the situation?
In your update to your question, you mention "on another local Ubuntu". Have you copied over the ssh private key to the other machine?
Solution 2:
As it hasn't been explicitly mentioned, sshd is by default very strict on permissions on for the authorized_keys files. So, if authorized_keys is writable for anybody other than the user or can be made writable by anybody other than the user, it'll refuse to authenticate (unless sshd is configured with StrictModes no)
What I mean by "can be made writable" is that if any of the parent directories are writable for anybody other than the user, users permitted to modify those directories can start modifying permissions in such a way that they can modify/replace authorized_keys.
Furthermore, if the /home/username/.ssh directory is not owned by the user, and thus the user has no permissions to read the key you can run into problems:
drwxr-xr-x 7 jane jane 4096 Jan 22 02:10 /home/jane
drwx------ 2 root root 4096 Jan 22 03:28 /home/jane/.ssh
Note that jane does not own the .ssh file. Fix this via
chown -R jane:jane /home/jane/.ssh
These sorts of filesystem permission issues will not show up with ssh -v, and they won't even show up in the sshd logs (!) until you set the log level to DEBUG.
- Edit
/etc/ssh/sshd_config. You want a line that readsLogLevel DEBUGin there somewhere. Reload the SSH server using the mechanism provided by the distro. (service sshd reloadon RHEL/CentOS/Scientific.) A graceful reload will not drop existing sessions. - Try authenticating again.
- Work out where your auth facility logs go and read them. (IIRC,
/var/log/auth.logon Debian-based distros;/var/log/secureon RHEL/CentOS/Scientific.)
Much easier to work out what's going wrong with the debug output which includes filesystem permission errors. Remember to revert the change to /etc/ssh/sshd_config when done!
Solution 3:
I received this error, because I forgot to add -l option. My local username was not the same as on the remote system.
This does not answer your question, but I got here looking for an answer to my problem.
Solution 4:
I got this message on a new instance based off the Ubuntu AMI. I was using the -i option to provide the PEM but it was still showing the "Permission denied (publickey)".
My problem was that I wasn't using the correct user. By running the ssh with ubuntu@ec2... it worked like normal.
Solution 5:
Something that's easier to read than ssh -v (in my opinion of course), is tail -f /var/log/auth.log. That should be run on the server you are trying to connect to, while attempting to connect. It will show errors in plain text.
This helped me solve my issue:
User [username] from xx.yy.com not allowed because none of user's groups are listed in AllowGroups