Working with Amazon EC2 key pairs

Amazon EC2 uses public–key cryptography to encrypt and decrypt login information. Public–key cryptography uses a public key to encrypt data, and then the recipient uses the private key to decrypt the data. The public and private keys are known as a key pair. If you want to log into an EC2 instance, you must specify a key pair when you launch it, and then provide the private key of the pair when you connect to it.

When you launch an EC2 instance, you can create a key pair for it or use one that you've already used when launching other instances. Read more about Amazon EC2 key pairs in the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Linux Instances or the Amazon EC2 User Guide for Windows Instances.

For information about the APIs and prerequisites, see the parent section (Working with Amazon EC2).