I'm following this tutorial: [Raspberry Pi - SSH Public Key Authentication](http://www.codeproject.com/Tips/600050/Raspberry-Pi-SSH-Public-Key-Authentication), but I'm generating the keys directly on my Raspberry. So this is exactly what I did: start a fresh Raspbian image ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "my_name" Saved at default folder `/home/pi/.ssh` Copied the public key `id_rsa.pub` to `/home/pi/.ssh/authorized_keys` using the command: cd /home/pi/.ssh mkdir authorized_keys cp id_rsa.pub authorized_keys/ so then I've gone to `authorized_keys` with cp authorized_keys and there was my public key in the format ssh-rsa big_string_here my_name then I copied the private key to my pen drive using cp id_rsa /media/PENDRIVE Opened puttygen, gone to Conversions, imported the key from my pen drive, saved the private key also in my pen drive, then opened Putty and started a connection to my Raspberry Pi. It asks me to type the user I want to connect, I type `pi` and then the terminal writes this: > "server refused our key" And gives the error: > Disconnected: No supported authentication methods available (server sent: public key) I've already formatted my Pi 3 times and tried this with a fresh installation, but I'm getting these errors. Could someone help me? UPDATE: When I try to log from the same raspberry pi, it says: Permission denied (public key). When I see the permissions of the file `id_rsa.pub` inside `authorized_keys` I get: -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 387 Fevb 16 14:06 id_rsa.pub is everything alright? Update 2: It looks like that `authorized_keys` is a file not a directory. So I changed it to a file and now there are the permissions: -rw------- 1 root root 387 Apr 25 18:44 authorized_keys -rw------- 1 pi pi 1766 ... id_rsa -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 387 ... ida_rsa.pub I think `authorized_keys` must be owned by `pi`, also? UPDATE 3: Changed group and user to `pi` and it worked. Thank you all.