
All About TPMs
Let's explore the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a standardized crypto processor chip that has recently become ubiquitous in our devices.

Read More >
Let's explore the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a standardized crypto processor chip that has recently become ubiquitous in our devices.
Read More >
'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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
Here are some of the (many, many) reasons our customers trust and use Smallstep for SSH.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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!
Read More >
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.
Read More >
Public web certificate authorities like Let's Encrypt were not designed to support internal use cases. What you need is a private certificate authority.
Read More >
Learn the differences between our Devops and Advanced Authorities offerings
Read More >
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.
Read More >
The shift from SCEP to ACME device attestation is a boon for endpoint security.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
Stop managing and rotating AWS IAM credentials in your workloads. IAM now lets you delegate AWS authentication to an ACME Certificate Authority.
Read More >
With systemd-creds, hardware-protected secrets just got a lot easier in Linux
Read More >
Managing Kubernetes is hard. Securing Kubernetes workloads is hard. Here's my journey into making it easier to use Kubernetes TLS.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
What if OpenSSL were a GUI program? Here's what it might look like.
Read More >
We integrated the Smallstep toolchain into Kelsey Hightower's excellent tutorial, Kubernetes The Hard Way.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
As I round the bend on two years at Smallstep, I have to ask myself: Why is this going so well?
Read More >
We researched how dozens of Docker services handle TLS certificates, and developed a few patterns for automating certificate management in container environments.
Read More >
Part two of a three part series on securing MongoDB with TLS: Configuring MongoDB with server and client TLS validation.
Read More >
The last in a three part series on securing MongoDB: Setting up a cluster TLS with X509 user authentication.
Read More >
Part one of a three part series on securing MongoDB with TLS: How to set up a Certificate Authority for MongoDB servers and clients.
Read More >
We're excited to announce a new release of our HSM-backed cloud ACME server, the Smallstep ACME Registration Authority for Google CA Services.
Read More >
A step-by-step guide to securing Istio and Kubernetes workloads using an open-source private certificate authority.
Read More >
We set up mutual TLS between five services for secure homelab monitoring with Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Promtail, and node_exporter.
Read More >
How to keep secret credentials safe on the command line.
Read More >
How to use a PKCS #11 HSM with step-ca
to protect your private keys
Read More >
Internal PKI continues to be essential but struggles with modern practices. But don't worry, there is hope.
Read More >
Let's make a tiny, standalone CA! We'll use a Raspberry Pi 4, YubiKey 5 NFC, and Infinite Noise TRNG.
Read More >
ACME is a great protocol for internal certificate management, but enterprise software is not yet ready.
Read More >
We added SSH certificate templates to step-ca, and it opened up some unexpected opportunities.
Read More >
We're excited to announce our new HSM-backed cloud ACME server, the Smallstep ACME Registration Authority for Google CA Services.
Read More >
We've added X.509 certificate templates to Step Certificates
Read More >
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.
Read More >
How to create and deploy a simple and minimal bastion host on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Read More >
Learn how to prepare for emergency access to your SSH hosts.
Read More >
Naming a CLI command requires deep and careful deliberation.
Read More >
The SSH agent acts behind the scenes to keep you safe. Here's how it works.
Read More >
A few of our favorite SSH tricks and tips sure to improve your daily experience.
Read More >
step now supports Microsoft Windows AND step-ca provides first-class support for single sign-on SSH
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
Video recording of the 10-minute lightning talk from Mike Malone on using SSH Certificates. This was recorded at BSidesSF 2020.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
No more editing Authorized_keys files for every change in membership and especially no more warnings about “remote host identification changes.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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!
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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).
Read More >
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.
Read More >
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.
Read More >
A better security model exists. Instead of relying on IP and MAC addresses to determine access we can cryptographically authenticate the identity of people and software making requests. It’s a simple concept, really: what matters is who or what is making a request, not where a request comes from. In short, access should be based on production identity
Read More >