Writing garbage to the $password variable would allow for a one time login to a remote machine.

I'm not even sure that there is an answer to this. The closest we've been able to figure out is to use ssh-agent prior to running the script which would allow for logins to a server that has the login by key enabled. Not all machines do for some reason here.

I guess I was just hoping that someone had thought of some thing I hadn't already thought of.