I’m fairly inexperienced with the ins and outs of SELinux, so this was novel to me:

I recently restored a /home partition from a backup, after which ssh key login stopped working.

I went through all the normal checks (permissions on my home directory, ~/.ssh, ~/.ssh/authorized_keys).

I started a debug sshd with “/usr/sbin/sshd -d -p 2222” – and key login worked!.

The culprit turned out to be SELinux – if I turned off enforcement with setenforce 0, I could log in via ssh keys again. Sure enough, there were messages in /var/log/audit/audit.log mentioning denied access to authorized_keys.

Running sudo restorecon -rv . from my restored home directory got things working again (and showed some helpful output about the changing contexts).

So, the real take-away (which is obvious for anyone who’s more used to SELinux than me), is to if your ssh keys aren’t being recognized, be sure to check /var/log/audit/audit.log as well.

Most of what I learned about this is from this blog post.

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