choice of fingerprint display upon new host access

Daniel Kahn Gillmor dkg at fifthhorseman.net
Tue Apr 20 04:48:00 EST 2010


When a user encounters a new ssh host, the VisualHostKey option makes
ssh display the visual fingerprint of the host's key.

ssh-keygen also supports BubbleBabble fingerprinting, but i don't see a
way to indicate that ssh should display the bubblebabble fingerprint
upon encountering a new host key.

It seems like it would be nice to make OpenSSH configurable about its
choice of fingerprinting scheme without adding a new option for every
possible flavor of fingerprinting.  In particular, i'm not proposing
that we include a BubbleBabbleHostKey option to ssh_config.

What do people think of the following approach for ssh_config:

 HostKeyFingerprint is an option which takes a comma-separated set of
fingerprint styles to display to the user upon seeing a new host key.
Supported options are: "hex", "bubblebabble", "visual"

   The default is: hex

For backward compatibility, -oVisualHostKey=yes implicitly adds "visual"
to this set if it is not already present.

If people think this is a good idea, i'll open a bugzilla ticket about
it.  I'm also interested to hear if people have any objections to the idea.

Regards,

	--dkg

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 892 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.mindrot.org/pipermail/openssh-unix-dev/attachments/20100419/8a4febdf/attachment.bin>


More information about the openssh-unix-dev mailing list