Unable to set permissions using Cygwin on Windows 7

Question

I have Cygwin 1.7.34(0.285/5/3) installed on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine and I've found that I'm unable to control the permissions of files/directories on my computer with it (through chmod). Most files/folders appear to have permissions fixed at -rw-r--r--.

This is a problem for me as incorrect permissions of the ~/.ssh directory on my workstation might be what's ultimately causing a related issue I have with establishing password-less ssh connections with a server.

This is what my ~/.ssh permissions look like currently:

$ ls -la .ssh/
total 30
drwxr-xr-x 1 davidfallah Domain Users    0 Mar 19 08:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 1 davidfallah Domain Users    0 Mar 18 15:17 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users  405 Mar 18 17:26 authorized_keys
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users 1675 Mar 18 18:00 gitolite-admin
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users  405 Mar 18 18:00 gitolite-admin.pub
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users  672 Mar 18 17:27 id_dsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users  613 Mar 18 17:27 id_dsa.pub
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users 1675 Mar 18 17:26 id_rsa
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users  405 Mar 18 17:26 id_rsa.pub
-rw-r--r-- 1 davidfallah Domain Users  512 Mar 18 16:16 known_hosts

Based on similar questions I've looked at, I tried running chown -v :Users .ssh/* in case that did anything, and I get the following:

$ chown -v :Users .ssh/*
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/authorized_keys’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/gitolite-admin’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/gitolite-admin.pub’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/id_dsa’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/id_dsa.pub’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/id_rsa’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/id_rsa.pub’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users
changed ownership of ‘.ssh/known_hosts’ from davidfallah:Domain Users to :Users

However, this exact output repeats itself every time, suggesting it's not actually making any changes. Similarly, trying to run chmod -v 777 ssh/* (as an example permission config) consistently produces the following output:

$ chmod -v 777 .ssh/*
mode of ‘.ssh/authorized_keys’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of ‘.ssh/gitolite-admin’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of ‘.ssh/gitolite-admin.pub’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of ‘.ssh/id_dsa’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of ‘.ssh/id_dsa.pub’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of ‘.ssh/id_rsa’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of ‘.ssh/id_rsa.pub’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)
mode of ‘.ssh/known_hosts’ changed from 0644 (rw-r--r--) to 0777 (rwxrwxrwx)

This behaviour is the same whether or not I run the Cygwin64 terminal as a regular user or as an administrator.

If it's relevant, my /etc/fstab file is:

# For a description of the file format, see the Users Guide
# http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#mount-table

# This is default anyway:
none /cygdrive cygdrive binary,noacl,posix=0,user 0 0

I also get the following information from df -T:

$ df -T
Filesystem     Type 1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
C:             ntfs 488282108 184977440 303304668  38% /cygdrive/c
D:             ntfs 488383484   7224840 481158644   2% /cygdrive/d
E:             ntfs 488374972 115013864 373361108  24% /cygdrive/e
U:             ntfs 102403916  94741644    946740 100% /cygdrive/u
W:             ntfs 585869308 187598724 398270584  33% /cygdrive/w
X:             ntfs  29604476  16650464  12954012  57% /cygdrive/x