After you spin up a new VM in your cloud environment, how do you know you're connecting to the right machine when you SSH in for the first time?
Unless you manually verify the SSH host key's fingerprint with what you see on the console of your VM, changes are good that you don't. It's just trusting that there's no hijacking traffic with DNS, ARP, or elsewhere.
I devised a scheme to automatically be sure I'm connecting to the same machine I deployed. And I just saw it work in practice! 🤓