We all know that EC2 comes default with ssh key pair authentication instead of traditional password login, but there at times we might need to use password based authentication for some scenarios like handing over access to someone who needs to login right away without them moving the private key file

So inorder to achieve password based authentication, just follow the easy steps

1) SSH Login using key pair that you generated or used an existing when you first launched the EC2 instance

2) Create an user, in the below case ‘developer’ is the user & Set password for the newly created user

sudo useradd -s /bin/bash -m -d /home/developer -g root developer

sudo passwd developer

3) Do visudo to be able to add the developer user to give sudo access.

sudo visudo developer ALL=(ALL:ALL) ALL

4) Enable password authentication in sshd_config file

sudo vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config PasswordAuthentication yes

5) Restart the ssh server as below and now you can just login using password now sudo /etc/init.d/sshd restart

Hope it helped fixing the password based login issue and please feel free to ask us any queries and leave us your comments