ssh public key authentication fails

I am using MacOSX Server 10.3.2 and I am trying to establish an ssh connection using my public key. In the past (I believe before 10.1) this was possible, but only for the administrator account. In the current configuration (out of the box ssh daemon, no changes) public key authentication fails. Is there a way to get this to work? I can think of (a) upgrading SSH to the latest version (but I will need to do that after every OS upgrade and I am not too Unix savvy) or (b) making changes to the configuration file but I would not know how.