Amazon's EC2 key file
About your statement that stealing EC2's key file would be useless.
I just tested moving my EC2 key file to a different machine, then I tried connecting ( ssh -i keyfile.pem ) to my EC2 instance using it from that other machine, and it worked without problems.
This confirms that If someone steals my key file, they can successfully use it.
I would like to know If there's something I need to do to prevent this from appening..??