🛡️ A private certificate authority (X.509 & SSH) & ACME server for secure automated certificate management, so you can use TLS everywhere & SSO for SSH.
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.github [action] goreleaser header packages 2021-09-11 13:05:17 -07:00
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api Introduce gocritic linter and address warnings 2021-10-08 14:59:57 -04:00
authority Improve handling duplicate ACME EAB references 2021-10-16 14:44:56 +02:00
autocert Use REAMDE.md suggested in code review. 2019-06-18 17:11:29 -07:00
ca Merge branch 'master' into hs/acme-eab 2021-10-16 13:32:13 +02:00
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errs Fix error message of bad request 2020-09-10 23:45:44 +09:00
examples Use Golang's default keep-alive. 2021-10-15 14:12:43 -07:00
kms Allow to configure azurekms using the URI 2021-10-12 18:24:58 -07:00
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make [action] sign and push sigs for multi-arch docker containers w/ cosign 2021-09-01 12:43:59 -07:00
monitoring ca-component -> certificates 2018-10-31 21:36:01 -07:00
pki Fix gocritic warnings. 2021-10-12 15:28:08 -07:00
scep Introduce gocritic linter and address warnings 2021-10-08 14:59:57 -04:00
scripts Just adding a comment to the step-ra install script 2021-08-18 08:46:37 -07:00
server Use Golang's default keep-alive. 2021-10-15 14:12:43 -07:00
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.golangci.yml Introduce gocritic linter and address warnings 2021-10-08 14:59:57 -04:00
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CHANGELOG.md Merge branch 'master' into keyvault 2021-10-12 15:15:35 -07:00
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README.md Add Certificate Manager notice for the pragmatic folks 2021-08-25 09:54:22 -07:00

Step Certificates

step-ca is an online certificate authority for secure, automated certificate management. It's the server counterpart to the step CLI tool.

You can use it to:

  • Issue X.509 certificates for your internal infrastructure:
    • HTTPS certificates that work in browsers (RFC5280 and CA/Browser Forum compliance)
    • TLS certificates for VMs, containers, APIs, mobile clients, database connections, printers, wifi networks, toaster ovens...
    • Client certificates to enable mutual TLS (mTLS) in your infra. mTLS is an optional feature in TLS where both client and server authenticate each other. Why add the complexity of a VPN when you can safely use mTLS over the public internet?
  • Issue SSH certificates:
    • For people, in exchange for single sign-on ID tokens
    • For hosts, in exchange for cloud instance identity documents
  • Easily automate certificate management:

Whatever your use case, step-ca is easy to use and hard to misuse, thanks to safe, sane defaults.


Don't want to run your own CA? To get up and running quickly, or as an alternative to running your own step-ca server, consider creating a free hosted smallstep Certificate Manager authority.


Questions? Find us in Discussions or Join our Discord.

Website | Documentation | Installation | Getting Started | Contributor's Guide

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Features

🦾 A fast, stable, flexible private CA

Setting up a public key infrastructure (PKI) is out of reach for many small teams. step-ca makes it easier.

⚙️ Many ways to automate

There are several ways to authorize a request with the CA and establish a chain of trust that suits your flow.

You can issue certificates in exchange for:

🏔 Your own private ACME server

ACME is the protocol used by Let's Encrypt to automate the issuance of HTTPS certificates. It's super easy to issue certificates to any ACMEv2 (RFC8555) client.

👩🏽‍💻 An online SSH Certificate Authority

  • Delegate SSH authentication to step-ca by using SSH certificates instead of public keys and authorized_keys files
  • For user certificates, connect SSH to your single sign-on provider, to improve security with short-lived certificates and MFA (or other security policies) via any OAuth OIDC provider.
  • For host certificates, improve security, eliminate TOFU warnings, and set up automated host certificate renewal.

🤓 A general purpose PKI tool, via step CLI integration

Installation

See our installation docs here.

Documentation

Documentation can be found in a handful of different places:

  1. On the web at https://smallstep.com/docs/step-ca.

  2. On the command line with step help ca xxx where xxx is the subcommand you are interested in. Ex: step help ca provisioner list.

  3. In your browser, by running step help --http=:8080 ca from the command line and visiting http://localhost:8080.

  4. The docs folder is being deprecated, but it still has some documentation and tutorials.

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