How to setup a honeypot in the cloud. Part 1:2 Using putty with EC2

In part one I talked about how to setup your ec2 instance. Now I will teach you how to logon to your instance. If you followed my instructions in step one you have installed the putty suite. Now what putty takes is a different kind of key. So you will have to use puttygen (it comes with putty) to convert your instance key to something that putty can recognize. Here are the steps:

•         Fire up puttygen.
•         Click on the load button or use the file menu
•         You will have to select to show all files
•         Select the *.pem key file you got from the instance.
•         You will see a popup. Push OK.
•         Push save private key. And you are done.

Now open putty or Extraputty and your AWS console. If you followed the tutorial and chose a Ubuntu instance then in the host name field of putty enter Ubuntu as your username, in this format ubuntu@yourec2host. Of course you will replace the second half with your ip address to the instance, which you will find by going to the ec2 tab and clicking on the instance. All the info will be in the bottom pane.

Now this is important, in putty on the right side expand the ssh list item and then click on the auth tab. Now click browse and select the *.ppk key file you just generated. The only way into an amazon instance is with public/private key encryption. So it should be pretty secure as long as you don’t release or lose your public key. You can retrieve it, but that is for another post (Note to self).

OK now go ahead and mess with the appearance tab. If you like to have your shell display in a certain way. Not many settings though. I would love to have a color selector. But anyway back to hacking.

To connect simply push the open button on the bottom of the application. This will pop up a command window, and authenticate with your username which is Ubuntu and for your password it will use your private key that you supplied. This is a very secure way of connecting to a server, I recommend it if you use ssh to log into any box you own (You do have a box with linux on it) Someday I will get around to writing how to do that. Well I think I will end here and call this Part 1.2.