[cs615asa] What's the X.509 certificate used for?

[Jan Schaumann]

hchen29 <hchen29 at stevens.edu> wrote:

> From the article online "How To: Getting Started with Amazon EC2", there  
> is a X.509 certificate should be downloaded first and a private key as  
> well. I want to know what this is used for.

The AWS command-line utilities use the certificate and key to
authenticate to Amazon's API.

This link may help you understand which authentication credentials are
used for which uses:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSSecurityCredentials/1.0/AboutAWSCredentials.html#X509Credentials

Reading up on the general concept of asymmetric key cryptography and the
x509 standard might also be useful.  Wikipedia is fairly helpful here.

-Jan