Smallstep: End-to-end encryption for distributed applications and the people who manage them. (we’re on Pacific Time)
Hey @wid we have a few open issues in opening source tracking that type of feature. Here’s an example: smallstep/certificates#239. The short answer to your question is “no, no one is currently working on this”. If someone from the community would like to pick it up we’d be happy to work with that person or team to point them in the right direction. The longer answer is that this feature will likely be making it into our hosted offering (in the next few months) before we have the time to implement it in open source.
The biggest hurdle in open source is that we store data in a nosql format (key - value), making it difficult to run any sort of query against the data without writing bespoke scripts to enumerate all values in a table, etc. So if someone wanted to take a look towards converting the storage layer to a SQL backend, that would be a good first step.
Hello,
In my GCP account, I have distributed an instance of Smallstep ACME Registration Authority for CAS to test the product. The sensations are very good; the deploy has been very fast and easy. Congratulations on the product. One question, can an ACME smallstep server only issue final certificates from a subCA generated in Google CAS? In other words, is the caCAS value unique? Can't it have several values? I mention this because if an enterprise's PKI infrastructure is generated in Google, it is very likely that it is made up of several SubCA's ( my on-premise PKI is made up of four SubCA's, for example, for compliance needs among others... ) Thank you.
Hi @thidalgosalvador, at the moment one ACME RA only supports one CAS CA, to support multiple ones, multiple instances are required. As we support multiple ACME provisioners it would be possible with code changes to support multiple ones, can you add an issue in https://github.com/smallstep/certificates with your use case?
I think this is essentially the same thing.
Not sure if we need another issue to track it (although this is a more specific use case).
You can play with
step ca token to work out the sort of token you'd want your server to generate.
(then run
step ca certificate using --token to request a certificate from the CA using a token)
There's an example in our docs that includes a bash script that uses the encryption key for the provisioner to generate a custom JWT for the CA. This is basically what you'd want your token server to do, if the user is authorized.
Hey @etudurd we don’t have any docs for that at the moment, but we do have this open issue smallstep/certificates#110 tracking docs for keycloack, and other OIDC providers.
Hey @korhojoa I’m not really sure what you mean by intermediate CA in the context of SSH certificates. SSH certificates don’t have a “chain of trust”. Just a signing key (root key) that signs SSH certificates. So not sure it would make sense to have
step-ca be an intermediate in that sort of setup.
thank you :0
:)
Hey @etudurd I believe that KeyCloak is possible, we just don’t have documentation for it (yet). We have this open ticket — smallstep/certificates#110. If you follow through with the KeyCloak integration we’d love to hear about it. KeyCloak, being an OIDC provisioner, should work similarly to Gsuite, Okta, Azure AD, etc.
https://smallstep.com/blog/build-a-tiny-ca-with-raspberry-pi-yubikey/ — we're partnering with yubico to give away five build kits for TinyCA run on a raspberry PI with a yubikey. Details in the post!
ill publish it in January, probably with an all internal acme solution, if testing proves successful
BTW, I want to say thank you to the smallstep team for building such a solid system. I don't have any huge deployment or complex configuration, just a little homelab I was tinkering with over the holidays, but smallstep was easy to set up and start distributing certs. Took a bit to fully grok the relationship of how cert requests work and how to maintain everything, but once I did it's a breeze. I ended up wanting to distribute ssh host certs in k8s, so I expanded autocert to support them, and put up a pull request at smallstep/autocert#24
As follow ups to that PR, I'd like to add more testing, and to add support for sending SIGHUP signals to the primary pod process to reload the certs. I'll wait until you have a chance to review that PR first, as both pieces require touching controller.go, and I don't want to keep moving the review goalposts
Hello, I have been trying to get the tiny-ca rpi system up and running but I am having some issues after getting everything installed and configured. I made a post of r/homelab, link here.
I have gotten some issues worked out like the ca not using my internal dns server, but now I am stuck on the following error.
I have gotten some issues worked out like the ca not using my internal dns server, but now I am stuck on the following error.
error validating ACME Challenge at https://tinyca.lan/acme/acme/challenge/Rrk1iKFeEjDRkFu0w025Ogty17RsL2R0: client GET https://tinyca.lan/acme/acme/new-order failed: Post "https://tinyca.lan/acme/acme/challenge/Rrk1iKFeEjDRkFu0w025Ogty17RsL2R0": stream error: stream ID 17; INTERNAL_ERROR
47 replies
any help would be super useful
same with an fqdn
it works but the ssl is not verified
@Tony-The-Developer ^=
Hi all, I was looking for some input on exposing a DIY CA (following smallstep's guides) to the internet directly? In theory if I use
ufw to allow only port 443 and also set my network's firewall rules accordingly, it should be secure enough... Ideally I'd like to be able to generate SSH certificates from anywhere (whether I'm at home, which is 90% of the time these days, or out) to connect to my hosts. I've tried using Cloudflare, but testing with the step ca certificate command yielded x509: certificate signed by unknown authority errors. I guess I could also setup VPN to my home network (where the CA is hosted) and connect via VPN for SSH cert generation once per day if I'm not home, too...
15 replies
Hi, sorry for the continued messages, but I've come across another question when working with step's SSH certs. I've also got some feedback on the step-ca docs but am not sure where to send it, or if you'd like me to send some here.
In any case, I've managed to get my SSH cert CA up and running and working with 90% of my hosts. I then had the thought to implement it with my GitHub account (non-enterprise), since GitHub can use SSH keys for authentication. Ultimately, I'm hoping that every time an SSH cert is generated on my machine, I'd setup a script so that it would replace the previous SSH cert on my GitHub account, so that way I'd have SSO for GitHub as well, in a sense.
In my preliminary testing, I have been trying to add my SSH cert public key to my Github account online manually and then testing with their
I guess what I'm wondering is, is something like this possible to do? I feel like I'm very close but can't quite extract the correct public key for some reason. I know on GitHub's enterprise plans I could even add my SSH CA user key, but can't justify the purchase of an enterprise plan for 1 user/myself. Thanks in advance, and apologies for the wall of text!
In any case, I've managed to get my SSH cert CA up and running and working with 90% of my hosts. I then had the thought to implement it with my GitHub account (non-enterprise), since GitHub can use SSH keys for authentication. Ultimately, I'm hoping that every time an SSH cert is generated on my machine, I'd setup a script so that it would replace the previous SSH cert on my GitHub account, so that way I'd have SSO for GitHub as well, in a sense.
In my preliminary testing, I have been trying to add my SSH cert public key to my Github account online manually and then testing with their
ssh -T git@github.com test. I've been extracting the currently active step SSH public key like this step ssh list --raw | step crypto key format --ssh on my local machine, with output looking something like this ecdsa-sha2-nistp256 AAAAE2VjZHNhLXN..., then adding it to my github account. However, that didn't seem to work and I keep getting Permission denied (publickey). errors when testing SSH. I've also tried uploading the output of step ssh list --raw, but their web UI didn't like that, even after changing the ecdsa-sha2-nistp256-cert-v01@openssh.com head to ecdsa-sha2-nistp256.I guess what I'm wondering is, is something like this possible to do? I feel like I'm very close but can't quite extract the correct public key for some reason. I know on GitHub's enterprise plans I could even add my SSH CA user key, but can't justify the purchase of an enterprise plan for 1 user/myself. Thanks in advance, and apologies for the wall of text!
6 replies
A weird ask, but is it possible to have a custom web page at https://tinyca.lan? I would like to host the root CA for downloading on local clients.
2 replies
Hello, while trying to deploy line by line the script provided in the SSH DIY example on the Host, i received the following error: The request lacked necessary authorization to be completed. Please see the certificate authority logs for more info. - at the “step ssh certificate ... —token $TOKEN” line. Do you know what I am missing and where i can find the step ca logs? Thank you!
9 replies
Why isn't there a -Principal switch for "step ssh login ..." when this switch exists for "step ssh certificate ..."? It seems like an oversight since both commands generate a new SSH certificate and the ability to control the certificate principals should be equally useful in either situation. I posted this question earlier but retracted the post thinking that the -Identity switch listed in the documentation for "step ssh login ..." took the place of the -Principal switch, but no. In fact, I can't tell what it does. It doesn't cause any errors, doesn't have any effect on the generated certificate, and I can't find where it is handled in the code.
5 replies
