Does key auth protect you from a MITM on the first connection?<p>That is, key auth as reasonable people use it, as you said.<p>And this:<p>&gt; but it&#x27;s really only useful for people that ignore basic security features anyway. (Key auth)<p>is precisely the point: that&#x27;s a <i>lot</i> 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>And these are people who use SSH to begin with. Not typically technologically illiterate, I would guess. If they can&#x27;t even be arsed to use &quot;basic security features&quot;, what good is this system, then?<p>Again: there is a way to use SSH properly, yes. But rare is the person who does this.<p>(But key auth is orthogonal to host fingerprinting anyway, this is kind of a red herring)