AWS ssh access 'Permission denied (publickey)' issue

Alex picture Alex · Sep 21, 2009 · Viewed 272.7k times · Source

How to connect to a AWS instance through ssh?

I have:

  1. Signed up at AWS;
  2. Created a public key and a certificate at AWS website and saved them to disk;
  3. Went to my console and created environment variables:

    $ export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/
    $ export EC2_CERT=/home/default/aws/cert-EBAINCRNWHDSCWWIHSOKON2YWGJZ5LSQ.pem
    $ export EC2_PRIVATE_KEY=/home/default/aws/pk-EBAINCRNWHDSCWWIHSOKON2YWGJZ5LSQ.pem
    
  4. Told AWS API to use this keypair and saved the keypair to file:

    $ ec2-add-keypair ec2-keypair > ec2-keypair.pem
    
  5. Started an AWS Ubuntu 9 instance using this keypair:

    $ ec2-run-instances ami-ed46a784 -k ec2-keypair
    
  6. Attempted to establish a ssh connection to the instance:

    $ ssh -v -i ec2-keypair.pem [email protected]
    OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-5ubuntu1, OpenSSL 0.9.8g 19 Oct 2007
    debug1: Reading configuration data /etc/ssh/ssh_config
    debug1: Applying options for *
    debug1: Connecting to ec2-174-129-185-190.compute-1.amazonaws.com [174.129.185.190] port 22.
    debug1: Connection established.
    debug1: identity file ec2-keypair.pem type -1
    debug1: Remote protocol version 2.0, remote software version OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-5ubuntu1
    debug1: match: OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-5ubuntu1 pat OpenSSH*
    debug1: Enabling compatibility mode for protocol 2.0
    debug1: Local version string SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_5.1p1 Debian-5ubuntu1
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT sent
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEXINIT received
    debug1: kex: server->client aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none
    debug1: kex: client->server aes128-cbc hmac-md5 none
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REQUEST(1024<1024<8192) sent
    debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_GROUP
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_INIT sent
    debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_KEX_DH_GEX_REPLY
    debug1: Host 'ec2-174-129-185-190.compute-1.amazonaws.com' is known and matches the RSA host key.
    debug1: Found key in /home/default/.ssh/known_hosts:11
    debug1: ssh_rsa_verify: signature correct
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS sent
    debug1: expecting SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_NEWKEYS received
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_REQUEST sent
    debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
    debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
    debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
    debug1: Trying private key: ec2-keypair.pem
    debug1: read PEM private key done: type RSA
    debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey
    debug1: No more authentication methods to try.
    Permission denied (publickey).
    

    What could be the problem and how to make it work?

Answer

Aaron Clauson picture Aaron Clauson · Sep 21, 2009

For Ubuntu instances:

chmod 600 ec2-keypair.pem
ssh -v -i ec2-keypair.pem [email protected]

For other instances, you might have to use ec2-user instead of ubuntu.

Most EC2 Linux images I've used only have the root user created by default.

See also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBro0TEAd7g