step-ca – online certificate authority for automated certificate management

step-ca is an online certificate authority designed to provide secure, automated certificate management. It is the server counterpart to Smallstep’s step command-line utility and offers a relatively approachable way to operate a private certificate authority.

The software can issue X.509 certificates for servers, clients, APIs, containers, virtual machines, databases and other infrastructure. It can also operate as an SSH certificate authority, issuing certificates for users and hosts instead of relying entirely on conventional SSH public keys.

Automation is a major focus. step-ca includes an ACME server supporting common ACME challenge types and can authorize certificate requests using mechanisms including OpenID Connect identity tokens, cloud instance identity documents, JWK tokens, SCEP and existing X.509 certificates.

The software can operate as an online intermediate beneath an existing root certificate authority. It supports multiple key types and configurable certificate lifetimes, including short-lived certificates intended to reduce reliance on conventional revocation mechanisms.

This is free and open source software.

Key Features

• Issues X.509 server and client certificates.
• Provides an ACMEv2-compatible certificate authority.
• Supports HTTP-01, DNS-01 and TLS-ALPN-01 ACME challenges.
• Issues SSH certificates for users and hosts.
• Supports OpenID Connect based enrollment.
• Supports SCEP certificate enrollment.
• Can operate as an intermediate certificate authority.
• Supports RSA, ECDSA and EdDSA keys.
• Offers automated certificate enrollment and renewal.
• Supports short-lived certificates.
• Integrates with the step command-line utility.
• Supports multiple database backends.

Website: github.com/smallstep/certificates
Support:
Developer: Smallstep
License: Apache License 2.0

step-ca is written in Go. Learn Go with our recommended free books and free tutorials.

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