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I see the distinction, but when I use public key cryptography, the keys are not symmetrical, and the server never sees my secret. Indeed it was my mistake when

I see the distinction, but when I use public key cryptography, the keys are not symmetrical, and the server never sees my secret. Indeed it was my mistake when I searched for authentication mechanisms, which aren't concerned with the initial exchange. Still, as a non-cryptographer, I have to wonder if it's possible to make a password work while using public key crptography. Perhaps the way SSH does it: use password to unlock the private key, but only send the public key?

megous 5y ago
Yes. You'd probably want to derive your private key from the password, so that you don't have to store anything and use this method portably on multiple computers. But there's no need to ever send a password to the server, even when setting/changing it. In theory... I don't know if there's any established auth method like this, that would eg. generate ed25519 secret key from a password, and used pubkey from it to send to the server when creating account or changing passwords and server using some challenge response, to authenticate users.