The issue

I experienced a seemingly weird issue with a freshly installed CentOS server today.

SSH Public key authentication was correctly set up; The sshd_config was properly configured and a ~/.ssh/authorized_keys was present with the correct rights and verified correct contents (as the file was yanked from another, working, server with scp).

All attempts to connect to the machine using key authentication silently failed however.

After debugging the usual sshd stuff i noticed the following entries in /var/log/audit/audit.log:

type=USER_AUTH msg=audit(1361289386.691:2344): user pid=22997 uid=0 auid=0 ses=99 subj=unconfined_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='op=pubkey acct="root" exe="/usr/sbin/sshd" hostname=? addr=81.81.21.231 terminal=ssh res=failed'
type=USER_AUTH msg=audit(1361289386.700:2347): user pid=22997 uid=0 auid=0 ses=99 subj=unconfined_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='op=pubkey acct="root" exe="/usr/sbin/sshd" hostname=? addr=81.81.21.231 terminal=ssh res=failed'

Turns out that SELinux was interfering with the key authentication because there was no security context for the newly created ~/.ssh directory.

The solution

The fix is pretty easy:

$ restorecon -R -v /root/.ssh

After which key authentication started working and the messages in audit.log changed to:

type=USER_AUTH msg=audit(1361289395.365:2351): user pid=22997 uid=0 auid=0 ses=99 subj=unconfined_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='op=success acct="root" exe="/usr/sbin/sshd" hostname=? addr=81.81.21.231 terminal=ssh res=success'
type=USER_AUTH msg=audit(1361289715.705:2378): user pid=23033 uid=0 auid=0 ses=99 subj=unconfined_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='op=pubkey_auth rport=41104 acct="root" exe="/usr/sbin/sshd" hostname=? addr=81.81.21.231 terminal=? res=success'
type=USER_AUTH msg=audit(1361289715.705:2379): user pid=23033 uid=0 auid=0 ses=99 subj=unconfined_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='op=key algo=ssh-rsa size=1023 fp=a4:5c:4d:16:61:8c:af:7f:ea:c7:95:ec:15:a9:20:66 rport=41104 acct="root" exe="/usr/sbin/sshd" hostname=? addr=81.81.21.231 terminal=? res=success'
type=USER_AUTH msg=audit(1361289715.714:2382): user pid=23033 uid=0 auid=0 ses=99 subj=unconfined_u:system_r:sshd_t:s0-s0:c0.c1023 msg='op=success acct="root" exe="/usr/sbin/sshd" hostname=? addr=81.81.21.231 terminal=ssh res=success'

Win!

No actual IP addresses or fingerprints were harmed during the creation of this article.