Click here to login into your S3 account to find your AWS access key

Amazon provides storage service to store data in the form of files and folders. It provides a simple storage service to store or retrieve any amount of data to/from amazon server. Currently, almost every user who is surfing internet must have an account on any web server. Every web server provides a user name and a password to access the account. By using this id, a user can store and retrieve his/her private data on that server.

Similarly, when one wants to take advantage of accessing the facility of amazon S3 service, one must have an account on amazon. After creating an account on amazon, user will be able to do any operation on S3 such as upload files, download files, and grant permission to access the uploaded files across the web.

To perform such operations on S3, Amazon provides an access key and a secret key, instead of using a username and a password.

AWS access key
This key is similar to the username. It is a text string that uniqually identifies you to access your own account. But this key alone is insecure. To make the operations secure amazon provides another key known as AWS Secret key.

AWS Secret key
This key is similar to the password. Before doing any operation a user has to provide these two keys as authentication keys. Technically, amazon takes a “signature” as header information for authentication. This “signature” is nothing but just an encrypted key which is a combination of access key and secret key.

It may be possible that user, who has an S3 account, can have one access key and more than one secret key so that his account may be accessed by other users, to whom the owner wants to give access permissions.

While connecting to S3 using BucketExplorer, you have to provide these two keys. After providing these two authentication keys, click on go button, it will check the authentication whether the keys are valid or not and give appropriate message.