It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.Ĭhanging the file permission as described above solved the problem in FileZilla and for using SSH from a terminal window.Filezilla is a free and open source SFTP client which is built on modern standards. The following message is displayed that describes why this problem is occurring: WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! 0777 for '/home/user/.ssh/id_rsa' are too open. If the following command is entered in the terminal window before changing the file permissions: ssh-add

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This solution is from the following web page, but was not the answer that was accepted on the page. It was just a matter of changing file permissions of the key file found in ~/.ssh/ as follows: chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa In my case, the solution was very simple. After switching back to Linux Mint 18.3, the problem disappears. Using the same login credentials and SSH key on any new Ubuntu based Linux distribution caused the login error. It also happens on newer versions of Ubuntu, but not on the latest Linux Mint Debian. The following paragraphs describes how the problem happened to me.Īfter moving from Linux Mint 18.3 to Linux Mint 19.1, this error occurred when trying to SFTP into a remote server. Attempting to SSH from the command line gave the following error: sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation How the FileZilla SFTP Connection Error Occurred Further to this it was not possible to SSH into the server from the command line using the SSH key. SSH was set up in FileZilla using the following tutorial: Īfter changing Linux distribution versions (on the client side, not the server), FileZilla would no longer connect, but displayed the error messages instead.

FileZilla SFTP Connection Error MessagesĪs can be seen in the image, two messages that appear are:Įrror: Pageant failed to answer challengeĮrror: Could not connect to server SSH Setup The image below shows the two messages that appear in FileZilla when trying to SFTP into a remote server. Error: Pageant failed to answer challenge Message in FileZilla

Filezilla ssh for windows