I have a patch, what do you think? I tested it by building an operating system of the form: (operating-system ... (services (append (list (service openssh-service-type (openssh-configuration (authorized-keys `(("root" ,(plain-file "first-key" "ssh-rsa ...")) ("root" ,(plain-file "second-key" "ssh-rsa ...")))))))))) I caught the derivation to build the authorized-keys directory, and root had 2 keys. Without the patch, root had only 1 key. Vivien