The cutting edge of cryptographic comms for distributed systems

Upgraded key protection is a popular Silicon Valley folk remedy for CISO insomnia

At WWDC24, Apple announced Private Cloud Compute. Relying heavily on crytographic attestation, it raises the bar on cloud privacy and security.

In this post, Carl covers the real-world challenges of release engineering that we've encountered publishing our popular open-source packages over the past 5 years.

For our 2023 holiday project, we're setting up an WPA3 Enterprise certificate-authenticated Wi-Fi network at home! And when your family from out of town asks to "jump on the Wi-Fi real quick," you'll learn why this type of network is such a hassle to manage.

As Microsoft deprioritizes Active Directory in favor of Entra, the cost of supporting AD CS. It is time to consider migrating your PKI to a modern, consolidated, and robust platform like Smallstep. This tutorial guides you through the process of getting started.

In this tutorial, we will set up the Smallstep Agent on an Ubuntu/Debian Linux VM, and use it to manage TLS certificates for a Redis workload.

You want the easy management of encryption and authentication that Smallstep provides - but you have legacy systems trusting old root certificates. Here's the great news - you can now do it all with bring your own root capabilities at Smallstep.

We are excited to announce that Smallstep is evolving into an end-to-end encryption platform. You can now manage the entire certificate lifecycle for everything within infrastructure, all from one place.

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

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to keep secret credentials safe on the command line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Naming a CLI command requires deep and careful deliberation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).