SSH

On-demand SSH certificates with Indent + Smallstep

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.

SSH vs. X.509 Certificates

By Linda Ikechukwu

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.

Clever Uses of SSH Certificate Templates

By Carl Tashian

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

🤦‍♂️ Facepalm Lesson One: The Delayed Aha Moment

By Mike Maxey

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

By Carl Tashian

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

SSH Emergency Access

By Carl Tashian

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

SSH Agent Explained

By Carl Tashian

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

SSH Tips & Tricks

By Carl Tashian

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

DIY Single Sign-On for SSH

By Carl Tashian

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

By Mike Malone

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.

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

By Mike Malone

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.