ssh-keyscan(1) — Linux manual page

NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | FILES | EXAMPLES | SEE ALSO | AUTHORS | COLOPHON

SSH-KEYSCAN(1)            General Commands Manual          SSH-KEYSCAN(1)

NAME         top

       ssh-keyscan — gather SSH public keys from servers

SYNOPSIS         top

       ssh-keyscan [-46cDHqv] [-f file] [-O option] [-p port] [-T
       timeout] [-t type] [host | addrlist namelist]

DESCRIPTION         top

       ssh-keyscan is a utility for gathering the public SSH host keys of
       a number 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 possible 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 scanning process involve any
       encryption.

       Hosts to be scanned may be specified by hostname, address or by
       CIDR network range (e.g. 192.168.16/28).  If a network range is
       specified, then all addresses in that range will be scanned.

       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.  Names read
               from a file must start with an address, hostname or CIDR
               network range to be scanned.  Addresses and hostnames may
               optionally be followed by comma-separated name or address
               aliases that will be copied to the output.  For example:

               192.168.11.0/24
               10.20.1.1
               happy.example.org
               10.0.0.1,sad.example.org

       -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.

       -O option
               Specify a key/value option.  At present, only a single
               option is supported:

               hashalg=algorithm
                       Selects a hash algorithm to use when printing
                       SSHFP records using the -D flag.  Valid algorithms
                       are “sha1” and “sha256”.  The default is to print
                       both.

       -p port
               Connect to port on the remote host.

       -q      Quiet mode: do not print server host name and banners in
               comments.

       -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 default is 5 seconds.

       -t type
               Specify the type of the key to fetch from the scanned
               hosts.  The possible values are “ecdsa”, “ed25519”,
               “ecdsa-sk”, “ed25519-sk”, or “rsa”.  Multiple values may
               be specified by separating them with commas.  The default
               is to fetch all the above key types.

       -v      Verbose mode: print debugging messages about progress.

       If an ssh_known_hosts file is constructed using ssh-keyscan
       without verifying 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 attacks which have begun after the
       ssh_known_hosts file was created.

FILES         top

       /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts

EXAMPLES         top

       Print the RSA host key for machine hostname:

             $ ssh-keyscan -t rsa hostname

       Search a network range, printing all supported key types:

             $ ssh-keyscan 192.168.0.64/25

       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,ecdsa,ed25519 -f ssh_hosts | \
                     sort -u - ssh_known_hosts | diff ssh_known_hosts -

SEE ALSO         top

       ssh(1), sshd(8) Using DNS to Securely Publish Secure Shell (SSH)
       Key Fingerprints, RFC 4255, 2006.

AUTHORS         top

       David Mazieres <dm@lcs.mit.edu> wrote the initial version, and
       Wayne Davison <wayned@users.sourceforge.net> added support for
       protocol version 2.

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the openssh (Portable OpenSSH) project.
       Information about the project can be found at
       http://www.openssh.com/portable.html.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see ⟨http://www.openssh.com/report.html⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball openssh-9.9p1.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨http://ftp.eu.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/⟩ on
       2025-02-02.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
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       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       man-pages@man7.org

GNU                           June 17, 2024                SSH-KEYSCAN(1)