"Host key verification failed" even with removed ~/.ssh/known_hosts

Question

When I try to ssh to my server from a linux computer with debian, I just get

Host key verification failed.

The only help I found online was deleting the key from ~/.ssh/known_hosts... well I did not only that, I deleted the whole ~/.ssh just to be sure, and it didn't help either, I still have Host key verification failed. error.

Karel Bílek · Accepted Answer · 2020-03-11T05:38:08.857

11

OK, answered.

When I run ssh with -v option, it showed me the actual error.

It was caused by mistakenly setting wrong access rights to /dev/tty, whatever that is, and ssh somehow didn't like it. sudo chmod 666 /dev/tty seemed to fix it.

edited Mar 11 '20 at 05:38

answered Sep 23 '12 at 05:36

Karel Bílek

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Make it `666`. There's no point giving execution permission to that device. – Stéphane Chazelas Sep 23 '12 at 07:56
OK, if you say so :) – Karel Bílek Sep 23 '12 at 12:50
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I have similar problem (`debug1: read_passphrase: can't open /dev/tty: No such device or address`) but `chmod 666 /dev/tty` does not help. It works with my user, but after I switched to another user with `su` it fails. – dma_k Mar 28 '13 at 20:31
@dma_k I had this problem as well. The fix was to run `su` with `-s /bin/bash` – EM0 Dec 24 '17 at 18:54

score 5 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 23 '12 at 11:42

So the poster's problem has been resolved. But in case others come to this question by searching and their symptoms are not coming from the same cause:

Deleting ~/.ssh/known_hosts (or just the offending line in it) will purge the cached host key. However, there is also a system-wide cache, which will be stored someplace like /etc/ssh/ssh_known_hosts. Host keys won't be cached there unless that's specifically requested. But if you're having host key verification issues, have a look in both of these files.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Jan 11 '19 at 20:15

It is also possible to run into this issue in various other ways, especially when dealing with Windows which may have several implementations of SSH tacked on to it.

I ran into this when ssh'ing into a Windows 10 machine that was running SSH server under Cygwin. When you run ssh from that prompt, it runs the cygwin version of ssh, which uses ~/.ssh to store the ssh files --- under cygwin that is /home/username.

However, if you run git from that same prompt, and Git has been installed via Windows (which in my case it had been), it uses the ssh files from C:\Users\username.ssh.

Normally you run ssh hostname to cache the host key for git, but in this case it does not work, since there are different known_hosts files.

Once I copied the key from one known_hosts file to the other, the git commands worked fine.

"Host key verification failed" even with removed ~/.ssh/known_hosts

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