A Secure Shell fingerprint record (abbreviated as SSHFP record) is a type of resource record in the Domain Name System (DNS) which identifies SSH keys that are associated with a host name. The acquisition of an SSHFP record needs to be secured with a mechanism such as DNSSEC for a chain of trust to be established.
<span class="nowrap">⟨Name⟩</span> [<span class="nowrap">⟨[[Time to Live|TTL]]⟩</span>] [<span class="nowrap">⟨Class⟩</span>] SSHFP <span class="nowrap">⟨[[Algorithm]]⟩</span> <span class="nowrap">⟨Type⟩</span> <span class="nowrap">⟨[[Hash function|Fingerprint]]⟩</span>
host.example.com.SSHFP42123456789abcdef67890123456789abcdef67890123456789abcdef123456789
In this example, the host with the domain name host.example.com
uses a Ed25519 key with the SHA-256 fingerprint 123456789abcdef67890123456789abcdef67890
. This output would be produced by a ssh-keygen -r host.example.com.
command on the target server by reading the existing default SSH host key (Ed25519). [5]
With the OpenSSH suite, the ssh-keyscan
utility can be used to determine the fingerprint of a host's key; using the -D
will print out the SSHFP record directly. [6]