Blog

'Provisioners' are crucial to how the Smallstep Platform works, and a faint understanding of what they are and do, is required to effectively use the Smallstep platform and open-source tools to issue and manage certificates.

Access your homelab from anywhere with a YubiKey and mutual TLS

By combining YubiKey’s smart card support with mutual TLS client certificates, hardware-bound private keys, and device attestation, you can expose your homelab to the internet in a way that carries very low security risk.

ACME EAB—What Is It, and How Do We Use It at Smallstep?

We've just added EAB to our ACME server. EAB adds more security and control to the process of automating certificate management actions for machines and services using the ACME protocol. Read on to find out what this means for you as a Smallstep user.

On-demand SSH certificates with Indent + Smallstep

By Jenessa Petersen

Get into all your hosts quickly and reduce the toil of manually finding and renewing SSH keys with Smallstep SSH Professional. Combine that with Indent’s time-bound, on-demand access and you have better security in minutes.

4 Reasons Customers Use Smallstep SSH Professional

By Jenessa Petersen

Here are some of the (many, many) reasons our customers trust and use Smallstep for SSH.

5 Infrastructure Security Advancements You May Have Missed in 2022

Apple MDA, GitHub OIDC, systemd-creds, Passkeys, and Identity-Aware Proxies: Here's a look at some infrastructure security advancements that caught our attention in 2022.

Secretless TLS client certificates in GitHub Actions

With GitHub Actions OIDC tokens and Smallstep Certificate Manager, you can access protected internal resources like cloud services, databases, websites, or Kubernetes clusters using short-lived TLS certificates and no hard-coded secrets!

Never DIY Your PKI

By J. Hunter Hawke

A good PKI is essential for most organizations’ security models. However, building one from scratch is much easier said than done. Don't build your own PKI. Take it from me; I tried to, and this is my (horror) story.

3 Reasons Why You Shouldn't Use Public CAs for Internal Infrastructures

Public web certificate authorities like Let's Encrypt were not designed to support internal use cases. What you need is a private certificate authority.

Introducing Advanced Authorities

By J. Hunter Hawke

Learn the differences between our Devops and Advanced Authorities offerings

The deal with Registration Authorities, and what they do for you with Smallstep Certificate Manager

We’ve launched an ACME Registration Authority quickstart guide to help you easily automate certificate issuance and renewal to endpoints within walled-off networks. Read up on Registration Authorities and why may need them.

ACME Device Attestation Explained

The shift from SCEP to ACME device attestation is a boon for endpoint security.

Managed Device Attestation: ACME as the Bottom Turtle in Mobile Device Management

By Herman Slatman

Have you ever wondered how to securely enroll a brand new phone or laptop onto your network and with your PKI? In this post we describe ACME Device Attestation, which uses a strong cryptographic proof of identity to request a client certificate from an internal PKI. It is set to replace SCEP as the premier method for enrolling with a CA. We’re very excited about it, and you should be too.

Making our toolchain work on the web using WebAssembly

By Herman Slatman

WebAssembly is a great technology for porting existing applications to run on a web page. Read along to learn what we had to do to compile our step toolchain to WebAssembly and make it usable on the web.

SSH vs. X.509 Certificates

Although SSH certificates are the most secure way to regulate SSH access, they are underutilised. They're also frequently confused with X.509 (aka TLS) certificates. This article explains what SSH certificates are, why you should be using them, and how they differ from their more popular X.509 counterparts.

How to use ACME to authenticate to AWS

Stop managing and rotating AWS IAM credentials in your workloads. IAM now lets you delegate AWS authentication to an ACME Certificate Authority.

The magic of systemd-creds

With systemd-creds, hardware-protected secrets just got a lot easier in Linux

Leverage Zero Trust for your Kubernetes Ingress Controllers

By J. Hunter Hawke

Managing Kubernetes is hard. Securing Kubernetes workloads is hard. Here's my journey into making it easier to use Kubernetes TLS.

Welcome to Smallstep Certificate Manager

Today is the first step in the Certificate Manager journey. We delivered the core platform to make users successful and are excited to see what you will do with it.

If OpenSSL were a GUI

What if OpenSSL were a GUI program? Here's what it might look like.

Automatic TLS in Kubernetes The Hard Way

We integrated the Smallstep toolchain into Kelsey Hightower's excellent tutorial, Kubernetes The Hard Way.

How we got here, and where we are headed

We have secured our seed and Series A funding - this is a huge thank you to our investors and our community who believe in us and continue to help us make Production Identity a reality.

Cheating my way to success

As I round the bend on two years at Smallstep, I have to ask myself: Why is this going so well?

Automating TLS certificate management in Docker

We researched how dozens of Docker services handle TLS certificates, and developed a few patterns for automating certificate management in container environments.

Securing MongoDB With TLS (Part 2 of 3)

Part two of a three part series on securing MongoDB with TLS: Configuring MongoDB with server and client TLS validation.

Securing MongoDB With TLS (Part 3 of 3)

The last in a three part series on securing MongoDB: Setting up a cluster TLS with X509 user authentication.

Securing MongoDB With TLS (Part 1 of 3)

Part one of a three part series on securing MongoDB with TLS: How to set up a Certificate Authority for MongoDB servers and clients.

New Release of Smallstep ACME RA: Automating internal TLS with ACME + Google CAS

We're excited to announce a new release of our HSM-backed cloud ACME server, the Smallstep ACME Registration Authority for Google CA Services.

Securing Istio and Kubernetes With a Private Certificate Authority

By Kevin Chen

A step-by-step guide to securing Istio and Kubernetes workloads using an open-source private certificate authority.

Grafana for homelab monitoring—with mTLS!

We set up mutual TLS between five services for secure homelab monitoring with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Promtail, and node_exporter.

How to Handle Secrets on the Command Line

How to keep secret credentials safe on the command line.

How to use step-ca with Hardware Security Modules (HSMs)

How to use a PKCS #11 HSM with step-ca to protect your private keys

2020 Certificate Management Survey Results

Internal PKI continues to be essential but struggles with modern practices. But don't worry, there is hope.

Build a Tiny Certificate Authority For Your Homelab

Let's make a tiny, standalone CA! We'll use a Raspberry Pi 4, YubiKey 5 NFC, and Infinite Noise TRNG.

The Embarrassing State of Enterprise ACME Support

ACME is a great protocol for internal certificate management, but enterprise software is not yet ready.

Clever Uses of SSH Certificate Templates

We added SSH certificate templates to step-ca, and it opened up some unexpected opportunities.

Introducing Smallstep ACME RA: Automating internal TLS with ACME + Google CAS

We're excited to announce our new HSM-backed cloud ACME server, the Smallstep ACME Registration Authority for Google CA Services.

Announcing X.509 Certificate Flexibility

We've added X.509 certificate templates to Step Certificates

🤦‍♂️ Facepalm Lesson One: The Delayed Aha Moment

What became clear in our product-led research is that we made a few mishaps. And there was one in particular that we wanted to fix ASAP. A series of go-to-market learnings and mishaps from smallstep.

DIY SSH Bastion Host

How to create and deploy a simple and minimal bastion host on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

SSH Emergency Access

Learn how to prepare for emergency access to your SSH hosts.

The Poetics of CLI Command Names

Naming a CLI command requires deep and careful deliberation.

SSH Agent Explained

The SSH agent acts behind the scenes to keep you safe. Here's how it works.

SSH Tips & Tricks

A few of our favorite SSH tricks and tips sure to improve your daily experience.

Announcing v0.14.2 of step and step-ca

step now supports Microsoft Windows AND step-ca provides first-class support for single sign-on SSH

DIY Single Sign-On for SSH

Let's set up Google SSO for SSH! We’ll use OpenID Connect (OIDC), SSH certificates, a clever SSH configuration tweak, and Smallstep’s open source packages.

Smallstep SSH

It took a lot of late nights and weekends to get here. I’m incredibly thankful for the work of our fantastic team, early access customers, and to their families for behind the scenes support. Today, we’re excited to announce the output of that work: the general availability of Smallstep SSH Professional Edition.

BSidesSF 2020 - If You're Not Using SSH Certificates You're Doing SSH Wrong

Video recording of the 10-minute lightning talk from Mike Malone on using SSH Certificates. This was recorded at BSidesSF 2020.

How to Run Your Own Private CA—Get Going with the Smallstep Onboarding Utility

By Alan Thomas

For the pragmatists and learn-by-doing people who want to get up and running quickly, we''ve launched a new interactive onboarding utility. It walks through the process of running a private CA and connecting two systems in your infrastructure.

Embarrassingly easy private certificate management for VMs on AWS, GCP, and Azure

step and step-ca (v0.11.0) adds support for cloud instance identity documents (IIDs), making it embarrassingly easy to get certificates to workloads running on public cloud virtual machines (VMs). This post introduces IID-based authentication with step and step-ca, and notes some interesting architectural and security details.

Prove you are not human -- Take the ACME Challenge

Automating internet security with the Let’s Encrypt certificate authority has led to the massive acceleration of safe web browsing. As we roll out ACME protocol support and give away some free hoodies, we want to thank Let’s Encrypt and the IETF for making it all possible.

Run your own private CA & ACME server using step-ca

With today's release (v0.13.0), you can now use ACME to get certificates from step-ca. ACME (RFC8555) is the protocol that Let's Encrypt uses to automate certificate management for websites. ACME radically simplifies the deployment of TLS and HTTPS by letting you obtain certificates automatically, without human interaction.

If you’re not using SSH certificates you’re doing SSH wrong

SSH has some pretty gnarly issues when it comes to usability, operability, and security. The good news is this is all easy to fix. SSH is ubiquitous. It’s the de-facto solution for remote administration of *nix systems. SSH certificate authentication makes SSH easier to use, easier to operate, and more secure.

Announcing v0.12.0 of step and step-ca

No more editing Authorized_keys files for every change in membership and especially no more warnings about “remote host identification changes.

Trust Anchors In Modern Systems; Don’t Overlook The Bottom Turtle

This issue is a discussion about the trust anchor and dependencies of systems. While a clever turtle reference often satisfies the room, getting a real answer to this question is fundamental to modern security practices.

Announcing v0.11.0 of step and step-ca

The big headline feature for this release is instance identity document support but there are a ton of other small improvements in this release including Helm, key types, self-signed certs, group checks for SSO, email SAN, bundling and other upgrades.

Great Minds Really Do Think Alike! No really, they do!

Great Minds Really Do Think Alike! I found an inarguable topic in the most unlikely of places, deep in the conversations between cyber-security experts.

Traffic, Bridge Tolls, and Secure Browsing - How Automation Secures The Internet

In this post, we will explore how successful public internet practices provide a set of instructions for how the industry should be thinking about securing internal systems. The second edition of the Modern Security for Leaders series.

Instincts, Fast Cars, and Modern Security - Why I Joined smallstep

smallstep’s vision is centered on modernizing security practices using the best available technology to solve security challenges. Now you’re probably saying (as I was at this point), there are hundreds of companies out there spending billions of dollars on modernizing practices. How much market is really left for a scrappy startup? Turns out a lot!

Good certificates die young: what's passive revocation and how is it implemented?

If you're a normal human person you probably don't think much about certificate revocation. This post will help you justify your apathy. It will explain why your indifference is, in fact, the technically correct attitude to have regarding this particular detail of your system's security architecture.

Step v0.9.0: Curl mTLS services with SSO certificates via OAuth OpenID Connect

Introducing step v0.9.0: Most enterprise IAM systems expose OpenID Connect (a suite of single-sign-on protocols that allow the creation of accounts and login into third party applications using a single account per user identity). In step v0.9.0 you can now leverage OpenID Connect to authenticate with step certificates to make issuance of personal certificates simple.

Step v0.8.6: Bring development closer to production with valid HTTPS certificates

By Sebastian Tiedtke

Almost 80% of web page loads now use TLS. But almost no one uses TLS in development and pre-production. Why? Because it's hard. That sucks. When dev and staging don't match prod, bad things happen. Today's step release, version 0.8.6, makes using TLS in dev & pre-prod environments a whole lot easier.

Step v0.8.3: Federation and Root Rotation for step Certificates

By Sebastian Tiedtke

The purpose of federation is to allow for secure communication across autonomous systems (e.g., across clouds or between kubernetes clusters). In this post, we’ll take a closer look into how federation works and how the step toolkit expands robust identity bootstrapping beyond a single Kubernetes cluster, cloud, or VM without getting bogged down by operational challenges.

Introducing step Certificates, secure, automated certificate management

Introducing step Certificates, an open-source project that makes secure automated certificate management easy, so you can use TLS and easily access anything, running anywhere, from everywhere. But step certificates is more than a certificate authority. It provides all the missing bits you need to run your own internal public key infrastructure (PKI).

Everything you should know about certificates and PKI but are too afraid to ask

Certificates and public key infrastructure (PKI) are hard. No shit, right? I know a lot of smart people who''ve avoided this particular rabbit hole. Eventually, I was forced to learn this stuff because of what it enables: PKI lets you define a system cryptographically. It''s universal and vendor-neutral yet poorly documented. This is the missing manual.

The case for using TLS everywhere

This post has a simple purpose: to persuade you to use TLS everywhere. By everywhere, I mean everywhere. Not just for the public internet, but for every internal service-to-service request. Not just between clouds or regions. Everywhere. Even inside production perimeters like VPCs. I suspect this will elicit a range of reactions from apathy to animosity. Regardless, read on.

Step: A New Zero Trust Swiss Army Knife from Smallstep