Difference Between .PEM And .PPK: Generate .PPK File For SSH

Navneet Cheema
Apr 23, 2024

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In this article, I'll describe the difference between .pem and .ppk and how to connect to your EC2 instances from a third-party SSH client (Putty).

What's the difference between .ppk and .pem?

The .pem and .ppk files are similar because they are both private key file formats.

The differences between .pem and .ppk are the following.

System platform compatibility

Linux users: .pem file format
Mac users: .pem file format
Windows PowerShell users: .pem file format
Windows PuTTY/Cygwin users: .ppk file format

PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) is a base64 container format for encoding keys and certificates. .pem download from AWS when you created your key pair. This is only a one-time download and you cannot download it again.

PPK(Putty Private Key) is a Windows SSH client, it does not support the .pem format. Hence you have to convert it to .ppk format using PuTTyGen.

A lot of open-source software, as well as AWS, generate .pem files for you to use. But if you are using something like PuTTY or WinSCP, you will most likely need to use a .ppk file. Converting .pem files to .ppk is easy using a program called PuTTYgen.

Files created by PuTTYgen are known as PPK files. PPK files are PuTTY Private Key Files developed by Putty and they serve as storage for the private keys the program generated. These files are used to enable communication securely with another party having the corresponding public key.