Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on January 23, 2006 11:13 PM
While PKI keys are more secure, they are not always more convenient. People use password authentication because it is far more convenient when portability comes into play. While PKI works great for you and your Gentoo machine, there are lots more people that use multiple machines, and multiple OSes and multiple locations. There are times when you cannot plug in or mount a USB drive with your keys and there are times when you simply don't have your USB drive with you. However, with password authentication, you can always log in, provided that you can get a SSH client.
In the past week I have logged into various machines via SSH from Netware, OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and AIX machines. None of the client machines were mine and it would not have been possible to mount a USB dongle on most of the clients. Without password authentication, I would not be able to get my work done.
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Posted by: Anonymous Coward on January 23, 2006 11:13 PMIn the past week I have logged into various machines via SSH from Netware, OSX, Linux, Windows, Solaris and AIX machines. None of the client machines were mine and it would not have been possible to mount a USB dongle on most of the clients. Without password authentication, I would not be able to get my work done.
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