How to resolve UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE issue during SSH of EC2 Server by Raj Gupta

If we get WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! when trying to SSH into Amazon EC2 Instance

 If your private key can be read or written to by anyone , then SSH ignores your key and you see the below error

[root@ip-172-31-91-224 ~]# ssh -i rajkp.pem ec2-user@ec2-54-91-231-121.compute-1.amazonaws.com

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
@         WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE!          @
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Permissions 0774 for 'rajkp.pem' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
Load key "rajkp.pem": bad permissions
Permission denied (publickey).

Its is due to our key pairs are open to other

[root@ip-172-31-91-224 ~]# ll
total 4
-rwxrwxr-- 1 root root 1671 Apr 17 08:41 rajkp.pem

So resolve this issue we need to change the permission of this key pair file.

[root@ip-172-31-91-224 ~]# chmod 700 rajkp.pem

[root@ip-172-31-91-224 ~]# ll

total 4

-rwx------ 1 root root 1671 Apr 17 08:41 rajkp.pem

Now if do SSH then its fine 

[root@ip-172-31-91-224 ~]# ssh -i rajkp.pem ec2-user@ec2-54-91-231-121.compute-1.amazonaws.com

       __|  __|_  )

       _|  (     /   Amazon Linux AMI

      ___|\___|___|

https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/2018.03-release-notes/

14 package(s) needed for security, out of 21 available

Run "sudo yum update" to apply all updates.

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-82-122 ~]$