Greetings for the day ! I was able to replicate the same in my Lab Environment. And below are the insights from my Lab Replication. • While adding

AuthorizedKeysFile

•

~/.ssh/authorized_keys

• I was getting the same error as your Post Upgrading. • But when I changed to

AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys

• The issue was fixed and I was able to kill and rerun the sshd process. Below is the reason for using %h instead of ~ • ~ is a shell feature, not part of the SSH daemon syntax — it’s expanded by the shell, but sshd does not parse it. • In older OpenSSH versions, using ~ in AuthorizedKeysFile may have worked due to lenient or indirect path resolution. • Modern OpenSSH versions (7.8+) strictly enforce configuration syntax — ~ is no longer accepted and may result in errors like: ◦ no AuthorizedKeysFile specified • The correct supported syntax is AuthorizedKeysFile %h/.ssh/authorized_keys ◦ Where %h is properly resolved by sshd as the user’s home directory