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Fix: Permission denied publickey gssapi keyex gssapi with mic

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  • 2 min read

SSH is a very useful protocol for when you need to remotely access a computer and are comfortable with typing around in a terminal. That said, having a secure SSH connection to your remote host is very important as it prevents from anyone connecting to said host and compromising system security. 

In this article, we’re talking about the “permission denied publickey gssapi keyex gssapi with mic” error, its causes and what you can do to fix the problem. 

Also read: How to fix error 60029: PermissionDenied? 


What causes the Permission denied publickey gssapi keyex gssapi with mic error?

The error can be caused by a number of different reasons including but not limited to:

  • Incorrect SSH configuration
  • The authorised_keys file has insufficient permissions
  • Incorrect SSH key
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How to fix Permission denied publickey gssapi keyex gssapi with mic error?

Here are two fixes you can try out.

Enable password authentication

One way of fixing the error is to simply enable password authentication on your remote host. All you have to do is edit the sshd_config file found in / etc / ssh and change the following flags.

  • PasswordAuthentication: change this to yes.
  • ChallengeResponseAuthentication: change this to no.

You can access the file using nano using this command.

sudo nano / etc /ssh / sshd_config

Change file permissions

If enabling password authentication didn’t work, try playing around with file permissions. 

Step 1: Open the sshd_config file using the following command.

sudo nano / etc /ssh / sshd_config

Step 2: Change the following options.

  • PermitRootLogin: change to no
  • PubkeyAuthentication: change to yes

Step 3: Comment the following options by adding a ‘#’ before the option.

  • GSSAPIAuthentication 
  • GSSAPICleanupCredentials

Step 4: Save the file and restart the sshd service.

systemctl restart sshd

Step 5: Finally, run the following commands to change file permissions on the required files. 

chmod 0700 /home/[username]
chmod 0700 /home/[home directory]/.ssh
chmod 0600 /home/[username]/.ssh/authorized_keys

Also read: Fix: Error: Attempt to use zero-length variable name

Yadullah Abidi

Yadullah Abidi

Yadullah is a Computer Science graduate who writes/edits/shoots/codes all things cybersecurity, gaming, and tech hardware. When he's not, he streams himself racing virtual cars. He's been writing and reporting on tech and cybersecurity with websites like Candid.Technology and MakeUseOf since 2018. You can contact him here: yadullahabidi@pm.me.

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