Ewen's Technical Blog

I’ve got a ppk file (a file created by PuTTYGen) that I use to SSH into my AWS linux boxes. Since I don’t use Windows boxes very much, I always forget the steps required to get the key in the correct pem format for obtaining the Windows password via the AWS console for newly spun up machine.

To do this:

• open PuTTYGEN
• load the ppk file
• Select Conversions > Export OpenSSH Key and save e.g. temp.pem
• Use OpenSSL to handle the decryption e.g. “openssl rsa -in temp.pem -out key.pem”
• The output e.g. key.pem is now in the correct format to be pasted into the AWS console.