# Balena ssh fails with Permission denied (publickey)

**URL:** <https://forums.balena.io/t/balena-ssh-fails-with-permission-denied-publickey/4863>\
**Category:** balenaOS\
**Created:** [January 2, 2019, 2:08am UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/balena-ssh-fails-with-permission-denied-publickey/4863 "2019-01-02T02:08:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 19

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**Author:** ![pdcastro](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/balena/user_avatar/forums.balena.io/pdcastro/32/1264_2.png) [@pdcastro](https://forums.balena.io/u/pdcastro)\
**Post date:** [March 21, 2022, 5:27pm UTC](https://forums.balena.io/t/balena-ssh-fails-with-permission-denied-publickey/4863/19 "2022-03-21T17:27:56Z")

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For information, balena CLI v13.3.0 or later also allows `balena ssh <device-ip-address>` to be used with **production** variants of balenaOS **without** the need of adding a ssh key to the `config.json` file. This requires the device to be running balenaOS v2.44.0 or later. The combinations are:

| Command | balenaOS (dev) | balenaOS (prod) \< v2.44.0 | balenaOS (prod) \>= v2.44.0 |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| `balena ssh <device-UUID>` | OK ✔ | OK ✔ | OK ✔ |
| `balena ssh <device-ip-address>` | OK ✔ | SSH key needs to be added to `config.json` | OK ✔ (CLI v13.3.0 or later) |

Also for information, on Windows, note that the balena CLI makes use of the Microsoft’s built-in ssh client that ships with Windows 10 or later. It is **not** compatible with PuTTY. Check the following answer for more details: [add SSH key after provisioning to production device? - #10 by pdcastro](https://forums.balena.io/t/add-ssh-key-after-provisioning-to-production-device/350886/10)

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