Permission denied (publickey) when SSH Access to Amazon EC2 instance

Question

I want to use my Amazon ec2 instance but faced the following error: Permission denied (publickey). I have created my key pair and downloaded .pem file. Given: chmod 600 pem file. Then, this command ssh -i /home/kashif/serverkey.pem [email protected] But have this error: Permission denied (publickey) Select the correct answer from above options

Answer 1

There could be various reasons for why your authentication is failing. First of all, make sure that you are using the correct key pair. I know it sounds trivial but it could actually be an issue in cases like these. Check if the username that you are using is correct or not. For ubuntu based AWS AMIs, the valid username is ubuntu, on others, it's ec2-user. Check if you are connecting to the right host.