# Fixing SSH Key Permissions
28 Apr 2018
If you’ve ever copied your SSH key from one sytem to another, you might see something along the lines of permissions are too open or sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation when trying to use SSH to connect from one server to another. Chances are the ownership or permissions of the ~/.ssh directory and the files inside of it are not correct. This can easily be fixed. As the user you’re trying to SSH to a server, run these commands:
sudo chown -R $USER:$USER ~/.ssh
sudo chmod 0600 ~/.ssh/*
sudo chmod 0700 ~/.ssh/
Once you’ve tried that, you should be able to SSH to your server again. I’ve hit this issue a number of times, so I hope this post helps someone out.