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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Host key verification is a client feature and is on by default. Have you really never gotten the giant warning after a reinstall? That's what that is. SSH is telling you that the server has changed and isn't what you think.

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I'm saying that 90% of these setups look like this (or do the equivalent thing manually):

   ssh -o StrictHostKeyChecking=no -o UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null root@192.168...

They have ssh, but no proper key management

Well, sure. You can turn off host key checking in ssh! But that isn't responsive to a point that (1) host key validation exists in ssh and (2) host key validation is on by default in ssh.

Their original comment was referring to people ignoring the warning banner and connecting anyway when the host changes. Not that it doesn't exist.

Exactly. But 'passive encryption' isn't helpful; if you can see the traffic, you can MITM it. Just RST the connection, wait for the reconnect, intercept.

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