As a part of the process for creating an EC2 instance you are asked to create or select an existing key pair. In this section, we will be looking into the importance of these key pairs and how to manage them.
Key pairs are used to allow you to connect to your instance, whether it is Linux-based or Windows-based. The method for connecting to each of these operating systems with key pairs differs, and we shall look into these methods shortly.
Each key pair uses public key cryptography using 2,048-bit SSH-2 RSA keys and is used to encrypt and decrypt administrative logs on credentials to the instance. Public key cryptography uses two separate keys to encrypt and decrypt data; these are known as the public key and the private key. The public key is maintained by the EC2 instance, and the private key is kept by us as the customers. We must download and store this private key securely, as it is unrecoverable if we lose it. The public key encrypts the credentials...
