The Secure Shell is widely used to provide secure access to remote systems, and everybody who uses it is familiar with routine password access. This is the easiest to set up, is available by default, but suffers from a number of limitations. These include both security and usability issues, and we hope to cover them here.

In this paper, we'll present the various forms of authentication available to the Secure Shell user and contrast the security and usability tradeoffs of each. Then we'll add the extra functionality of agent key forwarding, we hope to make the case that using ssh public key access is a substantial win.