The cutting edge of cryptographic comms for distributed systems

How to setup a passwordless SSH connection between a Windows 11 PC and an Ubuntu VM on Azure, using Smallstep short-lived SSH certificates.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.