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It's pretty typical to audit all your destination servers (which may number in the thousands) to ensure that they don't have private keys (the id_rsa) - in theory all they need is your id_rsa.pub.

Then, you only need to worry about securing your clients - and, it's typically difficult to wholesale (a) hack into all the clients, and then (b) yank the encrypted id_rsa off of them (as compared to hacking into a destination server, and then just wholesale waiting for people to login and grab their password). It's next to impossible in a secure environment (financial/medical/utility) where they have hardware dongles which contain their id_rsa. (Or, they move into a new class of secure, and use One Time Passwords, RSA Tokens)

Net-Net - multi-use static passwords are not used in secure environments.




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