get SSH key fingerprint in (old) hex format on new version of openssh

The client reports the sha1 hash of the server's key as a sequence of 16 pairs of hex digits, like this:

    a7:b1:3e:3d:84:24:a2:5a:91:5f:6f:e9:cf:dd:2b:6a

This is MD5 hash.

As you can see running

ssh-keygen -l -E md5 -f ssh_host_ecdsa_key.pub

will get you the same fingerprint you need without such harakiri you are explaining in your answer.

As it turns out, the SSH Cookbook has a way to manually generate keys in the older hex format. I used this on the freebsd server.

awk '{print $2}' key.pub | base64 -d | md5 | sed 's/../&:/g; s/: .*$//'

Breaking this down:

awk '{print $2}' key.pub

print out the second (space separated) column in "key.pub", which is the key itself

base64 -d

the key is base64 encoded. This will output the actual bytes of the key

md5

this is freebsd's equivalent of the 'md5sum -b' that was specified in the recipe on the ssh cookbook page

sed 's/../&:/g; s/: .*$//'

There are two sed commands here:

s/../&:/g;

replace every pair of characters on the line (thanks to the 'g' flag at the end) with that same pair followed by a colon

s/: .*$//'

remove any trailing colon (replace a colon followed by a space followed by anything up to the end of the line with nothing).

In cases like this I use the following little script (tested on Debian and Ubuntu):

#!/bin/sh

# Gather the public ssh host keys for the given host
# and for each key print the fingerprint in hex format using the given
# checksum command (e.g. md5sum, sha256sum, ...)

if [ "$#" != 2 ]; then
  echo "usage: $0 hostname checksum_command"
  exit 1
fi

ssh-keyscan $1 2>/dev/null | while read -r line; do
  echo "Scanned key:"
  echo $line
  echo "$2 fingerprint:"
  echo $line | awk '{print $3}' | base64 -d | $2 -b | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/../&:/g' | sed 's/:$//'
  echo
done

Example usage:

$ myscript host.example.com md5sum
Scanned key:
host.example.com ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIJUXq7vpcEpnZQxxiLw/tdg8ui4LoqbW1O5nGyLtGw49
md5sum fingerprint:
6c:ef:26:f7:98:ad:ed:5b:cc:ff:83:13:46:c9:f6:79

Scanned key:
host.example.com ssh-rsa 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
md5sum fingerprint:
b2:9c:cd:30:b1:38:e3:d1:17:d6:73:eb:03:9a:80:83

$ myscript host.example.com sha256sum
Scanned key:
host.example.com ssh-rsa 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
sha256sum fingerprint:
f4:61:58:e4:90:65:c4:70:98:7f:d1:40:0a:d8:d9:79:14:e6:91:dc:b6:ed:91:8c:c0:df:d9:65:db:dd:a0:18

Scanned key:
host.example.com ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAIJUXq7vpcEpnZQxxiLw/tdg8ui4LoqbW1O5nGyLtGw49
sha256sum fingerprint:
4b:73:d1:d7:80:87:46:64:56:71:64:10:7a:66:83:9b:c7:58:39:0b:16:74:dd:9b:d9:4b:e5:d5:61:7e:99:45