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    • Prevent Outages
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Step Certificates

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    Linda Ikechukwu
    Jenessa Petersen
    Alan Thomas
    Carl Tashian
    Herman Slatman
    J. Hunter Hawke
    Kevin Chen
    Max Furman
    Mike Maxey
    Mike Malone
    Sebastian Tiedtke

Manage, configure, and inspect all of your certificate authority provisioners in one place

By Linda Ikechukwu

'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.

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

By Linda Ikechukwu

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.

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

By Carl Tashian

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

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Build a Tiny Certificate Authority For Your Homelab

By Carl Tashian

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

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The Embarrassing State of Enterprise ACME Support

By Carl Tashian

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

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Clever Uses of SSH Certificate Templates

By Carl Tashian

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

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Announcing X.509 Certificate Flexibility

By Carl Tashian

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

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Announcing v0.14.2 of step and step-ca

By Max Furman

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

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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.

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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.

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Announcing v0.12.0 of step and step-ca

By Max Furman

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

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Announcing v0.11.0 of step and step-ca

By Max Furman

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.

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

By Mike Malone

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.

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

By Max Furman

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.

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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.

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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.

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

By Mike Malone

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.

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Introducing step Certificates, secure, automated certificate management

By Mike Malone

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).

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