An alternative: give out a public key, but restrict it to run e.g. reboot only. Put something like the following in your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys: command="/

An alternative: give out a public key, but restrict it to run e.g. reboot only. Put something like the following in your ~/.ssh/authorized_keys: command="/sbin/reboot",no-agent-forwarding,no-port-forwarding,no-pty,no-user-rc,no-X11-forwarding ssh-rsa AAAAB3Nza...LiPk== user@example.net See sshd(8) "AUTHORIZED_KEYS FILE FORMAT" for details.