How do RSA fingerprints protect from MITM attacks?

Question

I understand that RSA fingerprints are used to verify that you are really connecting directly to who you want to connect to, and not someone else posing as that site.

Like when you do a git push, it shows you an RSA key, then you can go to a webpage and see if the key you got matches the key on their webpage.

But what's to stop someone else from finding out the public RSA key that the site is using, and then replying with that same key, in order to pretend to be that site?

Answer 1

Some good information in the other answers as well, but to answer your question directly:

But what's to stop someone else from finding out the public RSA key that the site is using, and then replying with that same key, in order to pretend to be that site?

An attacker could do this, and they could trick you into encrypting your data using the public key and sending it to them. However, without the corresponding private key, this information would be useless to them because they would be unable to decrypt it.

Answer 2

Public keys are exactly that - public, intended for distribution. Having a copy of a public key doesn't allow you, on its own, to masquerade as the key's owner. It gives you the ability to encrypt data that you send to the owner in a manner that only the owner can decrypt it, using the private key that corresponds with the public key. It also allows you to decrypt data that was encrypted using the private key, proving that the data came from the owner of the private key, which is the use here - your copy of the public key allows you to be reasonably certain that the server you are communicating with is trustworthy (to the extent that you can trust the owner of the private key to maintain the secrecy of that private key).

Provided the owner keeps the private key, private, the system works as intended.

The Wikipedia article on public-key cryptography gives a good introduction to how things like RSA, DSA etc work.

Answer 3

The fingerprint is computed from the associated public key and can be calculated by your computer. If the fingerprint matches what you expect, then the key you are encrypting to is the appropriate one for your target.

While one can report a false fingerprint, the fact that they can be independently calculated from the actual possessed key makes pretty much useless unless the hash used for fingerprinting is small enough that a collision is realistically possible. Without a collision, any exchange of data would still be encrypted to the appropriate public key (since you verified that the one you're using matches the expected hash) and could not be decrypted without the corresponding private key.

Answer 4

It does not only show you the RSA key. It also encrypts the communication using a public / private key pair (including that RSA key). This way you are sure only server X can be the server ( since normally only server X has the private key).

You can read more about public / private keys here . There is quite some math involved.

Answer 5

If I am not mistaken, the function that is used to generate the fingerprint uses the private key to do so. So the fingerprint cannot* be recreated without the private key.

*There's the possibility of collisions since the range of values that valid fingerprints are less than the range of values of valid keys. It's sufficiently rare to still enable fingerprints to be useful.