Comment by SoftTalker
2 years ago
A service may provision an account with a provided ssh public key, so that you never log in with a password, even once.
It's sort of a chicken-egg problem though, presumably you do have a password somewhere along the line, such as in a portal where you created your account and uploaded your public key.
I'd say there are more valuable things you can do to improve security than solving the problem of "having to ssh in with a password one time to upload a key"
Maybe. Not having a password on the server eliminates all the risks associated with weak or leaked passwords. And then you can configure SSH to reject password logins altogether. It's not an insignificant benefit.
I'd say there are more valuable things you can do to improve security than solving the problem of "having to ssh in with a password one time to upload a key, then updating the config to reject password logins".
If you can't securely ship a public key to a fresh machine, then how can you trust the software running on that machine?
SSH password login is secure. Keys are preferred since you can't have asdf1234 as a key, but if you as the initial person to set up the server are the only one allowed password login and use a decent password, you're fine