[SoftTalker]

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.

[alexvitkov]

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"

[SoftTalker]

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.

[hnfong]

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".

[hedora]

If you can't securely ship a public key to a fresh machine, then how can you trust the software running on that machine?

[alexvitkov]

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