Why can't I use ssh keys to login to my Windows box via Cygwin's sshd?

Have used Cygwin's sshd for a while. Worked fine. Never tried to set up a keyed login. Tried today. Took a long time to get working. One possible problem: I wasn't running sshd as a service. Fixed that. One definite problem: /home and /home/myAccountID were both 0777. Changed /home to 0755 and /home/myAccountID to 0700, and also changed .ssh to 0700 for good measure. That worked!

It makes sense, really. sshd must be able to rely on your home being what you think it is; if /home or /home/yourAccountID are world-writable, they're vulnerable to other people highjacking them. I'm sure this is documented somewhere, I just hadn't thought to look at those directories. *sigh*

tags: cygwin  sshd  ssh keygen  remote login  

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