> Where do you get the fingerprints to check against? Any serious cloud/VPS provider will offer a way, leveraging HTTPS. On EC2, the Linux distro writes the S

> Where do you get the fingerprints to check against? Any serious cloud/VPS provider will offer a way, leveraging HTTPS. On EC2, the Linux distro writes the SSH fingerprint to the instance's 'system log' which can be securely viewed over the AWS web dashboard. On Linode, you can use a web-based terminal session (over HTTPS of course) to run a command to show the fingerprint. I've discussed this in other replies in this thread. > "Verify" just pushes the blind trust somewhere else. Not really. If my cloud provider is compromised, it's game-over anyway. Provided there's a secure channel to communicate the fingerprint, and provided we really do check the fingerprint (most people just don't bother), we should be ok. > write the public key to a block device, detach it from the new host, attach it to a verification service host and read it there Yep, that's pretty much the Amazon approach!