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I am using python Paramiko to connect using ssh to a remote ubuntu box hosted on a vps provider. Using a windows 7 based client machine, I am able to connect as follows:

import paramiko
import binascii
ssh = paramiko.SSHClient()
ssh.set_missing_host_key_policy(paramiko.AutoAddPolicy())
ssh.connect(hostname='HOSTNAME', username='USERNAME', password='PASSWORD')

This is all good, but now I want to verify the host server identity and because I'm on windows, Paramiko won't be able to fetch the known_hosts file or something like it. I tried the following code:

#... after connection is successful
keys = ssh.get_host_keys()
key = keys['HOSTNAME']['ssh-rsa']
print binascii.hexlify(key.get_fingerprint())
# key.get_fingerprint() returns the md5 hash of 
# the public part of the key (whatever that means)

which is giving an output similar to the following:

a42273f83e62d65cc87231a2ba33eff3

The thing is, on my VPS provider's cpanel, I have the RSA and DSA host key fingerprints listed as something like:

RSA 1b:c2:f4:8f:f2:86:fc:f2:96:ba:cc:24:41:e9:d7:86
DSA 36:b9:1f:ad:53:b5:c4:38:78:bf:cb:9d:38:fa:44:ce

and as can be seen none of the fingerprints match the generated one. How can I compare my manually generated fingerprint to the fingerprint values on the remote host's cpanel? Is what I'm doing correct?

Rabih Kodeih
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1 Answers1

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Solved, It turned out that the the RSA key fingerprint displayed in the control panel isn't for the VPS host, it's for an out of band special console. The actual key (of the VPS host) is located under: /etc/ssh/ssh_host_rsa_key.pub and the fingerprint value (its MD5 hash) is exactly what I was getting from the client side verification code. So there wasn't any problem to begin with.

Rabih Kodeih
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