Context
I was configuring a ssh key pair to authenticate against a remote repository as part of a script and I ran into the following error, while doing the initial git clone:
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@ WARNING: UNPROTECTED PRIVATE KEY FILE! @
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Permissions 0644 for '~/.ssh/key_name' are too open.
It is required that your private key files are NOT accessible by others.
This private key will be ignored.
Load key "~/.ssh/key_name": bad permissions
Solution
As it turns out, ssh key files need to have permission so that they are only readable by its owner. To fix this, as part of the script configuration section, I added the following line after having all the ssh files in place:
chmod -R go-wrx ~/.ssh
which recursively removes the write, read and execute permissions for the group and others bits.