I had changed the SSH password on something so I had to dig through my known hosts file, and saw the word FUCK spelled out in there in all caps. I chuckled but am sure there's an explanation
I know that "Vanity Addresses" are a common thing for onion sites, and there are tools which generate tons of keys looking for prefixes. I haven't seen such a tool for ssh host keys though.
They exist, but they're not nearly as fleshed out as the bitcoin vanity generators are. https://github.com/danielewood/vanityssh-go
I think I got "cunT" once and gave myself a heart attack because I thought I had accidentally committed a frustrated debugging log message to a work repo. I found it while searching for swears but it was in a file I hadn't changed
cmon man i aint never done nothin wrong with nobody's dang ssh keys. Jus lemme hold em
We had a system at work that generated 4 character alphanumeric reference numbers. Originally to avoid this they just excluded vowels from the letters but eventually they grew enough they ran out of available reference numbers so they added the vowels back in and I had to built the blacklist to avoid stuff like this happening. I reckon I probably tripped every IT filter known to man in a week long period looking for swear words in a variety of languages 😂
Whaaaaat. I had no idea this had disappeared... sad news!
Thankfully it's archived at least: https://archive.is/BYZ9l
The part where people share asterisks when they talk about their passwords? Just seems like good security honestly 😂 Glad Lemmy is keeping up with this pinnacle of security best practices.
The ~/.ssh/known_hosts file only contains public keys. I mean, maybe someone doesn't want to hand out the list of hosts that they talk to, but exposing it doesn't expose the private keys, which are what you really need to keep secret.
Those are in ~/.ssh/id_rsa or the like, depending upon key type.
The explanation is that it's random. Generate enough random strings and you're bound to get everything.
my old technology teacher told me about one time his ssh key was the whole soliloquy from hamlet.
then he turned himself into a fuckin pickle. craziest thing I ever seent
EDIT nvm?