inkel

Software programmer interested in SRE, DevOps, Machine Learning and Augmented Reality.

EC2 Key Pairs Fingerprinting

1min.

Ever happened to you that you wanted to know which SSH key you need to connect to an AWS EC2 instance? I always found that the fingerprints don’t tell me much, espcially because I always forget how to compute the fingerprints. Good that I’m back to writing, so I’m dumping my memory here:

  • if the key was generated by AWS, then use openssl pkcs8 -in path/to/key.pem -nocrypt -topk8 -outform DER | openssl sha1 -c
  • if the key was generated using ssh-keygen then use openssl rsa -in path/to/private/key -pubout -outform DER | openssl md5 -c

Why does AWS uses one format and why SSH other? Escapes my current knowledge.