WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! error message

Was trying to ssh into my Amazon Web Services EC2 instances yesterday

ssh -i ec2-webserver.pem root@ec2-***.compute-1.amazonaws.com

and encountered this funky error message :

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@ WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! @

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Permissions 0440 for 'ec2-webserver.pem' 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: ec2-webserver.pem

Password:

Upon further investigation, found out that this problem is actually caused by OpenSSH client security policy rather than AWS EC2.

To fix this error, change the permission of the /.ssh directory to 0700 and the ec2-webserver.pem file to 0600

chmod 0700 $HOME/.ssh/

chmod 0600 $HOME/ec2-webserver.pem

Try the ssh command again and bingo! No more WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! error message