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An attempt to connect to the remote server effingham.dreamhost.com via ssh from my company's network resulted in ssh giving an error about an RSA fingerprint mismatch, so I investigated and found that if I connected to the server via my mobile's carrier network everything went fine.

Following is the correct effingham.dreamhost.com RSA fingerprint as reported by Dreamhost.

The correct effingham fingerprint as reported by dreamhost

Indeed, connecting to the server using my mobile's carrier network, the keys match.

# ssh -o FingerprintHash=md5 effingham.dreamhost.com
The authenticity of host 'effingham.dreamhost.com (208.113.186.1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is MD5:90:8e:91:ac:f5:8c:9b:31:0c:5e:5e:8c:9c:b7:12:72.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

However, if I switch to my company's network, even though the IP address is the same as in the previous example, the keys don't match.

# ssh -o FingerprintHash=md5 effingham.dreamhost.com
The authenticity of host 'effingham.dreamhost.com (208.113.186.1)' can't be established.
RSA key fingerprint is MD5:fb:58:8d:e7:47:b6:b4:32:79:b9:da:12:87:23:33:cc.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)?

I'm ignorant to what might be going on here. It's my understanding that it cannot be DNS hijacking, as it requires the IP addresses to be different. Is that correct? If so, what could be the cause of this behaviour, and should I be worried someone might be eavesdropping the connection, or anything similar to that?

Fabio A.
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1 Answers1

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I suspect your company is redirecting outgoing port 22 TCP connections to a dummy SSH server. It'll probably log the IP making the connection so IT knows who tried to make the request.

As traffic passes through a gateway or firewall device, connections can be blocked or redirected.

You could try reconfiguring your server to run on a higher number port (e.g. 22222) as that may not be blocked, but it would probably be best to just ask your IT to allow SSH for you.

Silas Parker
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