Eucalyptus uses cryptographic key pairs to verify access to instances. Before you can run an instance, you must create a key pair. Creating a key pair generates two keys: a public key (saved within Eucalyptus) and a corresponding private key (output to the user as a character string). To enable this private key you must save it to a file and set appropriate access permissions (using the chmod command), as shown in the example below.
When you create a VM instance, the public key is then injected into the VM. Later, when attempting to login to the VM instance using SSH, the public key is checked against your private key to verify access. Note that the private key becomes obsolete when the public key is deleted.
chmod 0600 <keypair_name>.private