1SSH-KEYSCAN(1) BSD General Commands Manual SSH-KEYSCAN(1)
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4 ssh-keyscan — gather ssh public keys
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7 ssh-keyscan [-46Hv] [-f file] [-p port] [-T timeout] [-t type]
8 [host | addrlist namelist] [...]
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11 ssh-keyscan is a utility for gathering the public ssh host keys of a num‐
12 ber of hosts. It was designed to aid in building and verifying
13 ssh_known_hosts files. ssh-keyscan provides a minimal interface suitable
14 for use by shell and perl scripts.
15 ssh-keyscan uses non-blocking socket I/O to contact as many hosts as pos‐
17 sible in parallel, so it is very efficient. The keys from a domain of
18 1,000 hosts can be collected in tens of seconds, even when some of those
19 hosts are down or do not run ssh. For scanning, one does not need login
20 access to the machines that are being scanned, nor does the scanning
21 process involve any encryption.
22 The options are as follows:
24 -4 Forces ssh-keyscan to use IPv4 addresses only.
26 -6 Forces ssh-keyscan to use IPv6 addresses only.
28 -f file
30 Read hosts or addrlist namelist pairs from this file, one per
31 line. If - is supplied instead of a filename, ssh-keyscan will
32 read hosts or addrlist namelist pairs from the standard input.
33 -H Hash all hostnames and addresses in the output. Hashed names may
35 be used normally by ssh and sshd, but they do not reveal identi‐
36 fying information should the file's contents be disclosed.
37 -p port
39 Port to connect to on the remote host.
40 -T timeout
42 Set the timeout for connection attempts. If timeout seconds have
43 elapsed since a connection was initiated to a host or since the
44 last time anything was read from that host, then the connection
45 is closed and the host in question considered unavailable.
46 Default is 5 seconds.
47 -t type
49 Specifies the type of the key to fetch from the scanned hosts.
50 The possible values are “rsa1” for protocol version 1 and “rsa”
51 or “dsa” for protocol version 2. Multiple values may be speci‐
52 fied by separating them with commas. The default is “rsa1”.
53 -v Verbose mode. Causes ssh-keyscan to print debugging messages
55 about its progress.
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58 If an ssh_known_hosts file is constructed using ssh-keyscan without veri‐
59 fying the keys, users will be vulnerable to man in the middle attacks.
60 On the other hand, if the security model allows such a risk, ssh-keyscan
61 can help in the detection of tampered keyfiles or man in the middle
62 attacks which have begun after the ssh_known_hosts file was created.
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65 Input format:
66 1.2.3.4,1.2.4.4 name.my.domain,name,n.my.domain,n,1.2.3.4,1.2.4.4
68 Output format for rsa1 keys:
70 host-or-namelist bits exponent modulus
72 Output format for rsa and dsa keys:
74 host-or-namelist keytype base64-encoded-key
76 Where keytype is either “ssh-rsa” or “ssh-dss”.
78 /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts
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82 Print the rsa1 host key for machine hostname:
83 $ ssh-keyscan hostname
85 Find all hosts from the file ssh_hosts which have new or different keys
87 from those in the sorted file ssh_known_hosts:
88 $ ssh-keyscan -t rsa,dsa -f ssh_hosts | \
90 sort -u - ssh_known_hosts | diff ssh_known_hosts -
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93 ssh(1), sshd(8)
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96 David Mazieres <dm@lcs.mit.edu> wrote the initial version, and Wayne
97 Davison <wayned@users.sourceforge.net> added support for protocol version
98 2.
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101 It generates "Connection closed by remote host" messages on the consoles
102 of all the machines it scans if the server is older than version 2.9.
103 This is because it opens a connection to the ssh port, reads the public
104 key, and drops the connection as soon as it gets the key.
105BSD January 1, 1996 BSD