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README.md |
Step Certificates
step-ca
is an online certificate authority for secure, automated certificate management.
You can use it to:
- Issue X.509 certificates for all of your internal infrastructure
- Enable mutual TLS for encryption and authentication to your VMs, containers, devices, databases, APIs, and anything else you can think of, using internal hostnames
- Issue SSH certificates in exchange for single sign-on tokens and cloud instance identity documents.
- Easily automate certificate management with any ACME v2 client
- And do a lot more...
It's easy to use and hard to misuse, thanks to safe, sane defaults.
For automation, step-ca
has full ACME v2 support, a JSON API, and a Go wrapper.
For human use, step-ca
has a command line counterpart: the step
CLI tool.
Questions? Find us on gitter.
Website | Documentation | Installation Guide | Quickstart | Getting Started | Contribution Guide
Features
A fast, stable, private CA you run yourself
- Issue certificates for VMs, containers, devices, databases, APIs, and anything else you can think of, using internal hostnames.
- Issue TLS and SSH certificates for people, using their emails.
- Certificates work with TLS and HTTPS (they are RFC5280 and CA/Browser Forum compliant).
- Choose key types (RSA, ECDSA, EdDSA) & lifetimes to suit your needs
- Kubernetes helm charts, autocert, and cert-manager integration
- Short-lived certificates with automated enrollment, renewal, and revocation
- Capable of high availability (HA) deployment using root federation and/or multiple intermediaries
- Operate as an online intermediate for an existing root CA
- Pluggable database backends for persistence
Lots of (automatable) ways to get certificates
Configure the CA to issue certificates in exchange for:
- Single sign-on tokens from Okta, GSuite, Active Directory, or any OAuth OIDC provider
- Cloud instance identity documents for VMs on AWS, GCP, and Azure
- Single-use, short-lived JWK tokens issued by your CD tool — Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Terraform, etc.
Your own private ACME server
ACME is the protocol used by Let's Encrypt. It's super easy to issue certificates to any ACMEv2 (RFC8555) client.
- Use ACME in development & pre-production
- Supports the
http-01
,tls-alpn-01
, anddns-01
ACME challenge types - Works with any ACME client. We've written examples for:
- Get certificates programmatically using ACME, using these libraries:
lego
for Golang (example usage)- certbot's
acme
module for Python (example usage) acme-client
for Node.js (example usage)
- See our ACME docs for more
SSH Certificates
- Use certificate authentication for SSH: connect SSH to SSO, improve security, and eliminate warnings & errors
- Issue SSH user certificates using OAuth OIDC
- Issue SSH host certificates to cloud VMs using instance identity documents
Easy certificate management and automation via step
CLI integration
- Generate key pairs where they're needed so private keys are never transmitted across the network
- Authenticate and obtain a certificate using any enrollment mechanism supported by
step-ca
- Securely distribute root certificates and bootstrap PKI relying parties
- Renew and revoke certificates issued by
step-ca
- Install root certificates so your CA is trusted by default (issue development certificates that work in browsers)
- Inspect and lint certificates
Motivation
Managing your own public key infrastructure (PKI) can be tedious and error prone. Good security hygiene is hard. Setting up simple PKI is out of reach for many small teams, and following best practices like proper certificate revocation and rolling is challenging even for experts.
Amongst numerous use cases, proper PKI makes it easy to use mTLS (mutual TLS) to improve security and to make it possible to connect services across the public internet. Unlike VPNs & SDNs, deploying and scaling mTLS is pretty easy. You're (hopefully) already using TLS, and your existing tools and standard libraries will provide most of what you need. If you know how to operate DNS and reverse proxies, you know how to operate mTLS infrastructure.
There's just one problem: you need certificates issued by your own certificate authority (CA). Building and operating a CA, issuing certificates, and making sure they're renewed before they expire is tricky. This project provides the infrastructure, automations, and workflows you'll need.
step certificates
is part of smallstep's broader security architecture, which
makes it much easier to implement good security practices early, and
incrementally improve them as your system matures.
For more information and docs see the smallstep website and the blog post announcing this project.
Installation Guide
These instructions will install an OS specific version of the step-ca
binary on
your local machine.
Mac OS
Install step
and step-ca
together via Homebrew:
$ brew install step
Linux
Note: While the
step
CLI tool is not required to runstep-ca
, it will make your life easier so you'll probably want to install it too.
Debian
-
[Optional] Install
step
.Download the Debian package from the latest
step
release:$ wget https://github.com/smallstep/cli/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/step-cli_X.Y.Z_amd64.deb
Install the Debian package:
$ sudo dpkg -i step-cli_X.Y.Z_amd64.deb
-
Install
step-ca
.Download the Debian package from the latest
step-ca
release:$ wget https://github.com/smallstep/certificates/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/step-certificates_X.Y.Z_amd64.deb
Install the Debian package:
$ sudo dpkg -i step-certificates_X.Y.Z_amd64.deb
Arch Linux
We are using the Arch User Repository to distribute
step
binaries for Arch Linux.
You can use pacman to install the packages.
RHEL/CentOS
-
[Optional] Install
step
.Download the Linux tarball from the latest
step
release:$ wget -O step-cli.tar.gz https://github.com/smallstep/cli/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/step_linux_X.Y.Z_amd64.tar.gz
Install
step
by unzipping and copying the executable over to/usr/bin
:$ tar -xf step-cli.tar.gz $ sudo cp step_X.Y.Z/bin/step /usr/bin
-
Install
step-ca
.Download the Linux package from the latest
step-ca
release:$ wget -O step-ca.tar.gz https://github.com/smallstep/cli/releases/download/vX.Y.Z/step_linux_X.Y.Z_amd64.tar.gz
Install
step-ca
by unzipping and copying the executable over to/usr/bin
:$ tar -xf step-ca.tar.gz $ sudo cp step-certificates_X.Y.Z/bin/step-ca /usr/bin
See the systemctl
setup section for a
guide on configuring step-ca
as a daemon.
Kubernetes
We publish helm charts for easy installation on kubernetes:
helm install step-certificates
If you're using Kubernetes, make sure you check out autocert: a kubernetes add-on that builds on
step certificates
to automatically inject TLS/HTTPS certificates into your containers.
Test
$ step version
Smallstep CLI/0.10.0 (darwin/amd64)
Release Date: 2019-04-30 19:01 UTC
$ step-ca version
Smallstep CA/0.10.0 (darwin/amd64)
Release Date: 2019-04-30 19:02 UTC
Quickstart
In the following guide we'll run a simple hello
server that requires clients
to connect over an authorized and encrypted channel using HTTPS. step-ca
will issue certificates to our server, allowing it to authenticate and encrypt
communication. Let's get started!
Prerequisites
Let's get started!
1. Run step ca init
to create your CA's keys & certificates and configure step-ca
:
$ step ca init
✔ What would you like to name your new PKI? (e.g. Smallstep): Example Inc.
✔ What DNS names or IP addresses would you like to add to your new CA? (e.g. ca.smallstep.com[,1.1.1.1,etc.]): localhost
✔ What address will your new CA listen at? (e.g. :443): 127.0.0.1:8080
✔ What would you like to name the first provisioner for your new CA? (e.g. you@smallstep.com): bob@example.com
✔ What do you want your password to be? [leave empty and we'll generate one]: abc123
Generating root certificate...
all done!
Generating intermediate certificate...
all done!
✔ Root certificate: /Users/bob/src/github.com/smallstep/step/.step/certs/root_ca.crt
✔ Root private key: /Users/bob/src/github.com/smallstep/step/.step/secrets/root_ca_key
✔ Root fingerprint: 702a094e239c9eec6f0dcd0a5f65e595bf7ed6614012825c5fe3d1ae1b2fd6ee
✔ Intermediate certificate: /Users/bob/src/github.com/smallstep/step/.step/certs/intermediate_ca.crt
✔ Intermediate private key: /Users/bob/src/github.com/smallstep/step/.step/secrets/intermediate_ca_key
✔ Default configuration: /Users/bob/src/github.com/smallstep/step/.step/config/defaults.json
✔ Certificate Authority configuration: /Users/bob/src/github.com/smallstep/step/.step/config/ca.json
Your PKI is ready to go. To generate certificates for individual services see 'step help ca'.
This command will:
- Generate password protected private keys for your CA to sign certificates
- Generate a root and intermediate signing certificate for your CA
- Create a JSON configuration file for
step-ca
(see getting started for details)
You can find these artifacts in $STEPPATH
(or ~/.step
by default).
2. Start step-ca
:
You'll be prompted for your password from the previous step, to decrypt the CA's private signing key:
$ step-ca $(step path)/config/ca.json
Please enter the password to decrypt /Users/bob/src/github.com/smallstep/step/.step/secrets/intermediate_ca_key: abc123
2019/02/18 13:28:58 Serving HTTPS on 127.0.0.1:8080 ...
3. Copy our hello world
golang server.
$ cat > srv.go <<EOF
package main
import (
"net/http"
"log"
)
func HiHandler(w http.ResponseWriter, req *http.Request) {
w.Header().Set("Content-Type", "text/plain")
w.Write([]byte("Hello, world!\n"))
}
func main() {
http.HandleFunc("/hi", HiHandler)
err := http.ListenAndServeTLS(":8443", "srv.crt", "srv.key", nil)
if err != nil {
log.Fatal(err)
}
}
EOF
4. Get an identity for your server from the Step CA.
$ step ca certificate localhost srv.crt srv.key
✔ Key ID: rQxROEr7Kx9TNjSQBTETtsu3GKmuW9zm02dMXZ8GUEk (bob@example.com)
✔ Please enter the password to decrypt the provisioner key: abc123
✔ CA: https://localhost:8080/1.0/sign
✔ Certificate: srv.crt
✔ Private Key: srv.key
$ step certificate inspect --bundle srv.crt
Certificate:
Data:
Version: 3 (0x2)
Serial Number: 140439335711218707689123407681832384336 (0x69a7a1d7f6f22f68059d2d9088307750)
Signature Algorithm: ECDSA-SHA256
Issuer: CN=Example Inc. Intermediate CA
Validity
Not Before: Feb 18 21:32:35 2019 UTC
Not After : Feb 19 21:32:35 2019 UTC
Subject: CN=localhost
...
Certificate:
Data:
Version: 3 (0x2)
Serial Number: 207035091234452090159026162349261226844 (0x9bc18217bd560cf07db23178ed90835c)
Signature Algorithm: ECDSA-SHA256
Issuer: CN=Example Inc. Root CA
Validity
Not Before: Feb 18 21:27:21 2019 UTC
Not After : Feb 15 21:27:21 2029 UTC
Subject: CN=Example Inc. Intermediate CA
...
Note that step
and step-ca
handle details like certificate bundling for you.
5. Run the simple server.
$ go run srv.go &
6. Get the root certificate from the Step CA.
In a new Terminal window:
$ step ca root root.crt
The root certificate has been saved in root.crt.
7. Make an authenticated, encrypted curl request to your server using HTTP over TLS.
$ curl --cacert root.crt https://localhost:8443/hi
Hello, world!
All Done!
Check out the Getting Started guide for more examples and best practices on running Step CA in production.
Documentation
Documentation can be found in a handful of different places:
-
The docs sub-repo has an index of documentation and tutorials.
-
On the command line with
step help ca xxx
wherexxx
is the subcommand you are interested in. Ex:step help ca provisioner list
. -
On the web at https://smallstep.com/docs/certificates.
-
On your browser by running
step help --http=:8080 ca
from the command line and visiting http://localhost:8080.
The Future
We plan to build more tools that facilitate the use and management of zero trust networks.
- Tell us what you like and don't like about managing your PKI - we're eager to help solve problems in this space.
- Tell us what features you'd like to see - open issues or hit us on Twitter.
Further Reading
Check out the Getting Started guide for more examples and best practices on running Step CA in production.