SSH known hosts verification failure one liner

By Jon Archer

March 1, 2015

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!

Those who regularly build and rebuild machines or virtual machines on a dhcp network will probably be faced with this quite often, this is due to the known fingerprint for the previous host being different to a new one which has aquired the same IP address.

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED! @ @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY! Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)! It is also possible that a host key has just been changed. The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is c5:ab:00:3c:88:7e:18:8f:46:49:1d:af:f1:8b:4e:98. Please contact your system administrator. Add correct host key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message. Offending ECDSA key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:66 ECDSA host key for 192.168.1.165 has changed and you have requested strict checking. Host key verification failed.

There is an option to have SSH ignore these when connecting, however i find that cleaning out the old line before connecting far quicker and i do this with a Sed one liner.

The line in the known_hosts file we are interested in can be found at the end of the line:

Offending ECDSA key in /root/.ssh/known_hosts:66

66 in this case, so we can get sed to simply delete that line using:

sed -i '66d' ~/.ssh/known_hosts

An SSH session can now be opened without Host key verification failure.

Hope this helps someone.