SSH visual fingerprints
Filed under tips & tricks, security on oct 02, 2008
OpenSSH version 5.1 comes with a great new feature, namely visual fingerprint identification. This helps you in recognizing and identifying changes in fingerprints.
To enable visual fingerprinting for all your SSH sessions, add this to your ~/.ssh/config file:
Host *
VisualHostKey yes
This gives you a pretty piece of ASCII art when connecting to a remote host:
$ ssh labs.tehmaze.com Host key fingerprint is fb:24:0a:db:f3:10:d2:33:20:14:fb:43:52:1e:05:50 +--[ RSA 2048]----+ | ++Eo. | | . + . | | + + | | = o | | + = S | | o + . | | . . o . | | +.o + | | . oo. . | +-----------------+ Last login: Thu Oct 2 12:38:55 2008 from *.nl wijnand@drone:~$
Trying another host…
$ ssh example Host key fingerprint is 99:a3:6f:96:78:9c:ef:d7:83:26:33:1f:bd:b0:c7:be +--[ RSA 2048]----+ | | | | | | | o | | S | | . . . | | .o o o+. | | ..B + ++=. | | +.ooBooEo | +-----------------+ Last login: Thu Oct 2 10:47:23 2008 from *.nl wijnand@example:~$
Ain’t it pretty?
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