Solving ‘Permissions are too open’ from inside the app — auto-diagnosing and auto-fixing SSH key permissions
Almost every user new to SSH hits this wall: WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! Permissions 0644 for ‘/Users/…/id_rsa.pem’ are too open. This private key will be ignored. They placed the key in ~/.ssh/, entered the path into the SSH settings, and clicked Connect — only to see this. The fix is a single command (chmod 600 ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pem), which is obvious to anyone familiar with SSH but the biggest stumbling block for users who don’t open a terminal. Here’s the design behind solving this inside the app — diagnose, confirm, then auto-fix — and how the phases broke out. Why OpenSSH demands 0600 OpenSSH (and paramiko, which mirrors the same check …