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Verify Your SSH Keys |
A quick guide to help you verify your SSH keys using the fingerprint |
This is the guide to verifying your SSH keys in Windows. There are also guides for OS X and Linux.
GitHub uses SSH keys to establish a secure connection between your computer and GitHub.
To verify your SSH keys you need to find the fingerprint of each key on your computer and compare it to the fingerprint displayed on GitHub.
If there are keys on your GitHub account that you don't recognize you should delete them immediately.
An SSH key's fingerprint is a sequence of bytes unique to that key. Fingerprints are usually encoded into hexadecimal strings and formatted into groups of characters for readability.
We display SSH key fingerprints on GitHub along with the key's title:
First, download the GHKeyBrowser program from the following location:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/github-assets/GHKeyBrowser.exe
This is standalone executable provided by GitHub that will list all your ssh keys with fingerprints.
Now open https://github.com/settings/ssh and make sure the fingerprints attached to your GitHub account match the fingerprints in GHKeyBrowser.
If the fingerprints match, mark the key as verified.
If there are any SSH keys attached to your account that you don't recognize delete them immediately.
If all the fingerprints match then you are safe - continue social coding.