SSH-KEYSCAN(1) BSD General Commands Manual SSH-KEYSCAN(1)
NAME
ssh-keyscan -- gather SSH public keys from servers
SYNOPSIS
ssh-keyscan [-46cDHv] [-f file] [-p port] [-T timeout] [-t type]
[host | addrlist namelist]
DESCRIPTION
ssh-keyscan is a utility for gathering the public SSH host keys of a num-
ber of hosts. It was designed to aid in building and verifying
ssh_known_hosts files, the format of which is documented in sshd(8).
ssh-keyscan provides a minimal interface suitable for use by shell and
perl scripts.
ssh-keyscan uses non-blocking socket I/O to contact as many hosts as pos-
sible in parallel, so it is very efficient. The keys from a domain of
1,000 hosts can be collected in tens of seconds, even when some of those
hosts are down or do not run sshd(8). For scanning, one does not need
login access to the machines that are being scanned, nor does the scan-
ning process involve any encryption.
The options are as follows:
-4 Force ssh-keyscan to use IPv4 addresses only.
-6 Force ssh-keyscan to use IPv6 addresses only.
-c Request certificates from target hosts instead of plain keys.
-D Print keys found as SSHFP DNS records. The default is to print
keys in a format usable as a ssh(1) known_hosts file.
-f file
Read hosts or "addrlist namelist" pairs from file, one per line.
If '-' is supplied instead of a filename, ssh-keyscan will read
from the standard input. Input is expected in the format:
1.2.3.4,1.2.4.4 name.my.domain,name,n.my.domain,n,1.2.3.4,1.2.4.4
-H Hash all hostnames and addresses in the output. Hashed names may
be used normally by ssh(1) and sshd(8), but they do not reveal
identifying information should the file's contents be disclosed.
-p port
Connect to port on the remote host.
-T timeout
Set the timeout for connection attempts. If timeout seconds have
elapsed since a connection was initiated to a host or since the
last time anything was read from that host, the connection is
closed and the host in question considered unavailable. The de-
fault is 5 seconds.
-t type
Specify the type of the key to fetch from the scanned hosts. The
possible values are "dsa", "ecdsa", "ed25519", or "rsa". Multi-
ple values may be specified by separating them with commas. The
default is to fetch "rsa", "ecdsa", and "ed25519" keys.
-v Verbose mode: print debugging messages about progress.
If an ssh_known_hosts file is constructed using ssh-keyscan without veri-
fying the keys, users will be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.
On the other hand, if the security model allows such a risk, ssh-keyscan
can help in the detection of tampered keyfiles or man in the middle at-
tacks which have begun after the ssh_known_hosts file was created.
FILES
/etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts
EXAMPLES
Print the RSA host key for machine hostname:
$ ssh-keyscan -t rsa hostname
Find all hosts from the file ssh_hosts which have new or different keys
from those in the sorted file ssh_known_hosts:
$ ssh-keyscan -t rsa,dsa,ecdsa,ed25519 -f ssh_hosts | \
sort -u - ssh_known_hosts | diff ssh_known_hosts -
SEE ALSO
ssh(1), sshd(8)
Using DNS to Securely Publish Secure Shell (SSH) Key Fingerprints, RFC
4255, 2006.
AUTHORS
David Mazieres <dm@lcs.mit.edu> wrote the initial version, and Wayne
Davison <wayned@users.sourceforge.net> added support for protocol version
2.
BSD November 30, 2019 BSD