I’m trying to run a read-only diagnostic on an existing Railway service from my Mac. On November 1, 2026 (UTC), Railway CLI 5.71.0 returned “Host key verification failed.” and exit code 255 before the remote command ran. I need an authenticated way to verify the SSH server identity before proceeding.

Could Railway provide the current host-key algorithm and SHA-256 fingerprint for ssh.railway.com, with an official verification source, or the supported host-CA verification procedure? Please also explain how host-key rotations are announced.

The command used railway ssh with an explicitly selected project/environment/service and identity file, with the read-only script supplied through stdin. The standard user and system known-host files are absent, and the inspected SSH configuration has no alternate host-trust source. This is consistent with missing first-connection trust; I have not established a changed or mismatched server key.

We stopped without accepting an unverified key, using ssh-keyscan, or disabling host checks. The temporary client key was revoked afterward and its local files removed. No database contents or production state were changed by the attempted inspection.

An AI assistant suggested contacting Railway because it could not find a published server fingerprint in the official SSH documentation. We also found a similar report: https://github.com/railwayapp/cli/issues/1240. I’m asking for server-identity verification guidance, not application debugging or changes to my service.

Prepared with Railway's support template (v1).