That&#x27;s an odd tradeoff. I&#x27;m going to have to disagree with the sibling noting that &quot;compliance != security&quot;.<p>Here&#x27;s the thing: they say they can&#x27;t enforce users to encrypt passwords (hogwash; you can have a local agent that checks that), but do they check that users are providing good passwords? I have much more faith in a randomly generated key than I do in a human-generated password. The former pretty much <i>requires</i> compromising the machine; the latter I can just take pot-shots at the server with. (They <i>do</i> rate limit your SSH password attempts, right? right?)<p>Even if we assume that the password is good, and that the server won&#x27;t allow infinite tries to guess it, the security is only equivalent: compromise of the user&#x27;s local account will reveal the password (just sniff the password) or the key (just read the keyfile, and sniff the password if it is encrypted). I don&#x27;t see any world in which a password is <i>more</i> secure than a key.