EC2 supplies an OpenSSL encrypted "pem" private key. Sometimes you just need the ssh public key version of this file. There are a few ways to do this using openssl and other tools, but I prefer using ssh-keygen to create a public key from a private key. ssh-keygen -y -f yourprivatekey.pem This will print out the public key from any given private key. Works with EC2 pem files. Just drop the output