OpenSSH Does Enforce Config File Permissions — But Only on the Default Path
A technical article on DEV Community identifies a flawed methodology in a draft claiming OpenSSH's client does not enforce permissions on the ~/.ssh/config file. The author demonstrates that the draft's evidence was misleading because tests were run using the ssh -F flag, which points directly to a config file and bypasses OpenSSH's permission check entirely. Four identical test runs produced clean exit codes, but they were all traveling a code path that skips the enforcement mechanism, not one that proves it is absent. The article outlines four low-cost verification techniques — contradiction check, existence check, positive control, and ablation test — to catch such measurement errors. The core lesson is that reproducible command output does not confirm the correct code path was exercised during testing.
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