Spyke

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Has anyone else ever seen an SSH key/fingerprint thing string together an actual word? Or how about a curse word? XD

I had changed the SSH password on something so I had to dig through my known hosts file, and saw the word FUCK spelled out in there in all caps. I chuckled but am sure there's an explanation

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22 replies

possumpat.io

Nice try fbi you're not getting me that easy to give up my keys

44
midwest.social

I think I got "cunT" once and gave myself a heart attack because I thought I had accidentally committed a frustrated debugging log message to a work repo. I found it while searching for swears but it was in a file I hadn't changed

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frustrated debugging log message

Just use porn actresses' names. Or so a friend told me...

5

We had a system at work that generated 4 character alphanumeric reference numbers. Originally to avoid this they just excluded vowels from the letters but eventually they grew enough they ran out of available reference numbers so they added the vowels back in and I had to built the blacklist to avoid stuff like this happening. I reckon I probably tripped every IT filter known to man in a week long period looking for swear words in a variety of languages 😂

16

The part where people share asterisks when they talk about their passwords? Just seems like good security honestly 😂 Glad Lemmy is keeping up with this pinnacle of security best practices.

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The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn't want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn't expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.

Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.

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lemm.ee

The explanation is that it's random. Generate enough random strings and you're bound to get everything.

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lemmy.world

my old technology teacher told me about one time his ssh key was the whole soliloquy from hamlet.

then he turned himself into a fuckin pickle. craziest thing I ever seent

EDIT nvm?

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programming.dev

I know that "Vanity Addresses" are a common thing for onion sites, and there are tools which generate tons of keys looking for prefixes. I haven't seen such a tool for ssh host keys though.

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sh.itjust.works

not particularly exciting I think I had 'dog' one time while distro hopping.

5

The explanation is pretty boring. If you look at https://superuser.com/questions/421997/what-is-a-ssh-key-fingerprint-and-how-is-it-generated it's explained that some fingerprints are displayed with Base64, which according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64 allows the use of all 26 letters of the alphabet, and both the complete uppercase and lowercase sets.

So basically it's just random chance that a given fingerprint has some data that shows up as a word.

SSH keys can likewise use base64, e.g. for PEM format, as per https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/492704/what-encoding-is-used-for-the-keys-when-using-ssh-keygen-t-rsa

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Has anyone else ever seen an SSH key/fingerprint thing string together an actual word? Or how about a curse word? XD | Spyke