Multiple Keys in ssh-agent, fail to clone

Hey all,

We recently upgraded from Git 2.8 to 2.9 and saw an issue when there are multiple keys added to my ssh-agent.

I have two keys. 
- KeyA (my company that has access to the repository I want to clone)
- KeyB (just my personal key with access to my personal stuff)

Having both keys in loaded and listed in `ssh-add -L` fails to clone the repository. I tried to change the order of the key in the agent but neither KeyA, KeyB nor KeyB, KeyA will work. The only case that works if I have KeyA loaded an no other key is added to the ssh-agent.

Having multiple Keys loaded works with Git 2.8 and Git 2.7 (I didn’t try older versions) Cloning fails with “Unauthorized Access” of our Git provider. (It’s Bitbucket in this case)

I read the Changelog for 2.9 and couldn’t find any reference to changed key handling. Is there anything that I can add to the `git clone` command to get the old behavior?

Thank you for your help, Best Ben

Benjamin Fritsch <beanie@benle.de> writes:

I do not think this has much to do with the version of Git, unless you are getting an updated SSH client together with your new version of Git from whoever distributes it.

And it may not even be related to SSH version. Did you change your ~/.ssh/config recently by any chance? I personally do load many keys (one per destination) in the agent and back when I didn't know better, I didn't have IdentityFile line per each host, i.e. the last lines in these two entries were missing in my ~/.ssh/config:

    Host foo.bar.com
      Protocol 2
      User gitolite
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/foo-bar-com

    Host foo.baz.com
      Protocol 2
      User junio
      IdentityFile ~/.ssh/foo-baz-com

If you try to do "ssh -v -v foo.bar.com" with such a configuration, you would observe that many keys are "offered" to the other side to see if it is the one that it recognises, and you end up offering too many of them before the right one. An output from such a failing session of "ssh -v" ends like this for me:

    $ ssh -v foo.bar.com
    ...
    debug1: Offering DSA public key: foo-baz-com
    debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
    debug1: Offering RSA public key: xxy-fsa-com
    debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
    debug1: Offering DSA public key: github
    debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
    debug1: ...
    debug1: Offering RSA public key: gitorious
    debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
    Received disconnect from 192.168.1.1: 2: Too many authentication failures for gitolite
    Disconnected from 192.168.1.1

If I do not have "IdentityFile ~/.ssh/foo-bar-com" line for the "Host foo.bar.com" part, "ssh -v foo.bar.com" cannot know which one of the keys it has available can be used to authenticate you with foo.bar.com, so it ends up asking "do you know this key and would you allow me to access you?" for each and every key. Having the line lets it use the appropriate key right at the beginning, would not leak (they are "public" keys, so "leak" is not that a serious problem, though) other public keys you have, and your authentication is likely to succeed.

Thank you for the great feedback. I could confirm that this is a problem on Bitbucket’s end. Sorry for the confusion. I managed to successfully clone with Git 2.9 and Git 2.8

Best, ben

Hi Benjamin,

On Wed, 13 Jul 2016, Benjamin Fritsch wrote:

I once had the same problem, due to a server newly closing the connection directly after the first key failed. Note: the problem was the *server* (that was updated at the same time as my local Debian packages).

The only remedy was to specify the exact key in ~/.ssh/config via IdentityFile.

Hth, Johannes