&gt;Does key auth protect you from a MITM on the first connection?<p>Yes. Key auth will protect you from your SSH connection being listened to, and will make credential theft reliant on social engineering. However, someone could still pretend to be the server (potentially stealing your commands), but there really doesn&#x27;t exist any way to solve that.<p>&gt;is precisely the point: that&#x27;s a lot of people. SSH doesn&#x27;t work for those people. We can play the blame game, but at the end of the day, clearly something is &quot;not right&quot;.<p>Nothing works for those people, at least generally with SSH users you can assume that they should know better.<p>&gt;Again: there is a way to use SSH properly, yes. But rare is the person who does this.<p>I&#x27;d hardly consider SSH key auth users rare.<p>&gt;(But key auth is orthogonal to host fingerprinting anyway, this is kind of a red herring)<p>But it almost completely fixes the main problem caused by MitM, someone gaining access to the server you&#x27;re logging into.