Posts Tagged ‘ssh’

ssh-keygen randomart

January 18th, 2010 @ 2:35 pm UTC

So, at some point in the recent past (I don’t think I noticed when), ssh-keygen started displaying a “randomart” representation of keys that it generates:

fanty:~ evan$ ssh-keygen -f test -C evan
Generating public/private rsa key pair.
Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase):
Enter same passphrase again:
Your identification has been saved in test.
Your public key has been saved in test.pub.
The key fingerprint is:
20:e9:b0:5b:5a:2b:ad:e8:4d:e4:b3:a0:32:49:2d:97 evan
The key's randomart image is:
+--[ RSA 2048]----+
|                 |
|     .           |
|  . o .          |
|   + . .         |
|  o.=   S        |
| ooE .           |
|.o*+o            |
|=.+oo            |
|=o.o             |
+-----------------+

Does anybody know why or what it’s supposed to mean?