I finally migrated my home configuration to guix home. However, it seems guix home creates all symlinks with 777 permissions. This causes problems with openssh as it will not recognize my ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. It seems the directories have reasonable permissions (maybe because they already existed?), but it seems like someone could in theory edit the symlinks in-place (though I wasn't able to figure that out). I formulated based on the example in Section 11.1 of the devel user manual. You should be able to recreate the problem with (replacing ): (home-environment (services (list (simple-service 'my-home-files-service home-files-service-type (list `("ssh/authorized_keys" ,(plain-file "home-authorized-keys" "")))))))