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  • Your premise about keys binding "user on machine 1 to a specific user on machine 2" in a way that passwords don't is incorrect. You must log in as a specific user, whether that's via key or password does not make any difference. WRT having "an unknown number of machines to login" to, you can use a different key for each of them if you want (see man ssh, the -i option), and your remote user can allow for more than one key -- which actually makes the key login more flexible than the password login, since normal *nix systems only allow for one password per user. Commented Dec 2, 2013 at 22:55
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    I disagree, but perhaps I was not clear. A key is a MACHINE + user to MACHINE + user combo. A password is simply a user to Machine + User combo. So 900,000 different machines to one machine + user, passwords are the way to go. Most of us don't really do that we connect 1 machine + user (coteyr@localhost) to 1 machine + user (someone@someserver). If I wanted to build a system that says no matter what client I (coteyr) want to connect to someone@someserver then my only real option is passwords. Commented Dec 3, 2013 at 4:04