Stop MitM on the first SSH connection, on any VPS or cloud provider | Hacker News

Hacker News commenters discussed how risky SSH’s first connection is, since host key verification can be vulnerable to MITM attacks.

Ideas included logging and comparing host key fingerprints, or using certificate/CA-based trust instead of manually accepting unknown hosts.

The thread also covered safer cloud VM bootstrapping, including cloud-init, monkeysphere, GPG, and other ways to deliver secrets securely.

Overall, the discussion showed how hard it is to automate secure access for new servers without weakening trust on first use.