Help Center/ Elastic Cloud Server/ Troubleshooting/ Remote Login/ Remote Login Errors on Linux/ What Do I Do If "Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /root" Is Displayed and I Can't Log In to an ECS Using SSH Key?
Updated on 2026-03-23 GMT+08:00
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What Do I Do If "Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /root" Is Displayed and I Can't Log In to an ECS Using SSH Key?

Symptom

You cannot log in to an ECS using an SSH key, and the error message "Authentication refused: bad ownership or modes for directory /root" is displayed.

Figure 1 Failure of logging in to the ECS using an SSH key

Possible Causes

Error information in logs indicates that the permission of the /root directory is incorrect. Check the permission, owner, and owner group of the /root directory, .ssh in the /root directory, and authorized_keys in the .ssh directory.

Solution

Change the owner, owner group, and permission of the /root directory to recover the SSH.