Host Key Verification Failed

Question

I'm trying to ssh into my UBUNTU through my PC with Cygwin on it. I can WINSCP without a hitch, however when I ssh through a command line it comes up with this error:

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@    WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!     @
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IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!
Someone could be eavesdropping on you right now (man-in-the-middle attack)!
It is also possible that a host key has just been changed.
The fingerprint for the ECDSA key sent by the remote host is
5d:84:de:4e:a8:81:df:22:06:23:98:34:cd:26:f5:1a.
Please contact your system administrator.
Add correct host key in /home/Trevor/.ssh/known_hosts to get rid of this message.
Offending ECDSA key in /home/DIRECTORY
ECDSA host key for HOSTNAME has changed and you have requested strict checking.
Host key verification failed.

So I looked it up and it said that I needed to change my host key in my .ssh folder that's located in my home folder. Well, there wasn't one so I made one. Tried again and got the same error.

What to do?

Solution 1

"Host key verification failed" means that the host key of the remote host was changed.

Ssh stores the host keys of the remote hosts in ~/.ssh/known_hosts. You can either edit that text file manually and remove the old key (you can see the line number in the error message), or use

ssh-keygen -R hostname

Solution 2

try

 rm -f /home/user/.ssh/known_hosts

or deletes the offending key from the known_hosts

ssh-keygen -R hostname

Solution 3

This generally means that the host key of your remote host has been changed. It can be used to avoid the men in the middle attacks and to make your host secure. You can simply remove this using:

ssh-keygen -R hostname | ip address 

or

ssh-keygen -f "/root/.ssh/known_hosts" -R ip address

Solution 4

1. go to known_hosts vim ~/.ssh/known_hosts
2. delete the hostname that is causing this issue HOSTNAME

Solution 5

It mainly happens when your remote server keys changes and your system has the old key. So we need to clear the key of your remote server in the below file.

1. ]#vi ~/.ssh/known_hosts
2. Delete the host entry in the file that is causing the problem.like the below

1x.xx.xx.xx ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXNoYTItbmlzdHvbhdjhyyeindHAyNTYAAABBBAMazUadnY2m81h0qVQyaKN3tiUSrIPw42rz7orVM9gusGpDDxtFbjMwxpjGOevVba1KNY5eI1yZx9U+uTz0Jpc=

3.save the file and retry with your login.

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