Man1 - ssh-keyscan.1

is a utility for gathering the public SSH host keys of a number of hosts. It was designed to aid in building and verifying

files, the format of which is documented in

provides a minimal interface suitable for use by shell and perl scripts.

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

For scanning, one does not need login access to the machines that are being scanned, nor does the scanning process involve any encryption.

The options are as follows:

Force

to use IPv4 addresses only.

Force

to use IPv6 addresses only.

Request certificates from target hosts instead of plain keys.

Print keys found as SSHFP DNS records. The default is to print keys in a format usable as a

file.

Read hosts or

pairs from

one per line. If

is supplied instead of a filename,

will read from the standard input. Input is expected in the format:

1.2.3.4,1.2.4.4 name.my.domain,name,n.my.domain,n,1.2.3.4,1.2.4.4

Hash all hostnames and addresses in the output. Hashed names may be used normally by

and

but they do not reveal identifying information should the file’s contents be disclosed.

Connect to

on the remote host.

Set the timeout for connection attempts. If

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.

Specify the type of the key to fetch from the scanned hosts. The possible values are

Multiple values may be specified by separating them with commas. The default is to fetch

and

keys.

Verbose mode: print debugging messages about progress.

If an ssh_known_hosts file is constructed using

without verifying the keys, users will be vulnerable to

attacks. On the other hand, if the security model allows such a risk,

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.

Print the RSA host key for machine

Find all hosts from the file

which have new or different keys from those in the sorted file

$ ssh-keyscan -t rsa,dsa,ecdsa,ed25519 -f ssh_hosts | \ sort -u - ssh_known_hosts | diff ssh_known_hosts -

wrote the initial version, and

added support for protocol version 2.