SSH to EC2 via ChromeOS

Using the Chrome Secure Shell Extension to connect to an Amazon EC2 instance is pretty easy, although there are a couple of steps you need to know about.

Creating Public/Private Keys

AWS creates PEM files to make it possible to connect to EC2 instances via SSH.  The Chrome Secure Shell, however, needs a private and public key.

Generating a public key is easy, but you will not be able to do this from ChromeOS. (It is probably possible to do this ChromeOS when running in Dev mode, but I haven't tried it yet.)

Using the following command:  ssh-keygen -y -f key.pem > key.pub

At this stage you will have 2 files: key.pem and key.pub.  Rename the key.pem to just 'key'. This will allow the Chrome Secure Shell to understand that it is the private key.

Create the SSH Connection

To create the SSH connection, open the Secure Shell extension and create a new connection.  Use the EC2 connection string as you normally would - for example, an EC2 instance running Ubuntu would be ubuntu@<ec2 address> or when running an Amazon Linux instance it would be ec2-user@<ec2 address>.

Import the private/public key by clicking in the Import button - from the file chooser select both the key and key.pub files.