"server refused public-key signature despite accepting key" error SFTP

Connectivity
1

When trying to log in using an RSA keypair I get “the server refused public-key signature despite accepting key”.

Using winscp 5.7.5. I tried searching the internet and though it said it was a known bug and had solutions I need someone to tell me the solution in a ELI5 way please.

2

A couple of things to review.
Is the public key generated in ~/.ssh/ and assign the correct permissions as chmod 400 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys?
Have you at any point edited sshd_conf? - if you have restore the original.

If I were you I might delete /.ssh/authorized_keys and try following Will Dizon’s excellent YouTube tutorial

3

Yes the key is generated there and chmoded. No I didn’t edit the mentioned file. That is the video I used to set up the keys.

4

Okay!
I also use winscp 5.7.5 but have not experienced your problem over many different distro’s and projects. I can say with a fair degree of certainty that it’s not a bug within winscp.

What is the servers OS? Ubuntu, MineOS Turnkey, and so on.

Make sure the servers up-to-date for instance Ubuntu would use sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade

Take a screenshot and posted here as if you are going to generate RSA keypair with PuTTYgen so we can see the settings that you have selected.

5

I’m used the MineOS Turnkey nodeJS ISO. I have ran both “apt-get update and apt-get upgrade” and “apt-get dist-upgrade”.

I leave all setting at default on PuTTYgen as seen here:

Edit: it failed to upload pic so I posted it here on flickr

Edit 2: The first 2 results of this Google Search is people talking about the known bug in winscp.

6

You’re right those are the first two results and I noticed them first time I looked into your issue. The bug in the first search result has been resolved. Let’s settle this once and for all, try using a different client. FileZilla I recommend downloading the zip version so it’s portable and doesn’t have to be installed for testing.

If if you still receive the same error message with FileZilla. I would assume that something server-side. Taking the shotgun approach I would MineOS reimage your server and regenerate a RSA keypair.