Chainguard Container for step-ca-fips

Minimal FIPS image of step-ca, an online Certificate Authority (CA) for secure, automated X.509 and SSH certificate management

Chainguard Containers are regularly-updated, secure-by-default container images.

Download this Container Image

For those with access, this container image is available on cgr.dev:

docker pull cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/step-ca-fips:latest

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard Registry.

Compatibility Notes

The Chainguard step-ca-fips image is a minimal drop-in replacement for the upstream smallstep/step-ca container image. It provides equivalent functionality for operating a private Certificate Authority (CA) and is fully compatible with official configurations and the smallstep Helm chart. This image is designed to be a minimal, secure alternative that runs as a non-root user. Switching to this image should not require any changes to your existing deployment configuration.

FIPS support

Chainguard's step-ca-fips image ships with a validated redistribution of the OpenSSL FIPS provider module. For more on FIPS support in Chainguard container images, consult the guide on FIPS-enabled Chainguard Images on Chainguard Academy.

Getting Started

You can deploy this image using the step-ca Helm chart. Be sure to override the image by setting the following values in a values.yaml file:

image:
  repository: cgr.dev/ORGANIZATION/step-ca-fips
  tag: "latest"

Be sure to replace the ORGANIZATION placeholder with the name used for your organization's private repository within the Chainguard registry.

Then, deploy the step-ca helm chart.

helm repo add smallstep https://smallstep.github.io/helm-charts
helm repo update
helm install step-ca smallstep/step-certificates --namespace step-ca --create-namespace --values values.yaml --wait

Issue a Certificate

Once deployed, you can issue a certificate using the step CLI by port-forwarding the CA service and referencing the provisioner and root certificate.

kubectl port-forward svc/step-ca-step-certificates -n step-ca 9000:443 &
export STEP_CA_URL=https://127.0.0.1:9000

1. Extract root certificate

kubectl get configmap step-ca-step-certificates-certs -n step-ca \
  -o jsonpath="{.data['root_ca.crt']}" > root_ca.crt
export STEP_CERTIFICATE_AUTHORITY=root_ca.crt

2. Extract provisioner password

PASSWORD=$(kubectl get secret step-ca-step-certificates-provisioner-password -n step-ca -o jsonpath="{.data.password}" | base64 -d)

3. Request a certificate

step ca certificate "test.step-ca.local" cert.crt cert.key \
  --provisioner "admin" \
  --password-file <(echo "$PASSWORD") \
  --ca-url "$STEP_CA_URL" \
  --root "$STEP_CERTIFICATE_AUTHORITY"

If successful, step will issue a TLS certificate signed by the step-ca instance.

Documentation and Resources

• step-ca Github Repository
• step-ca Helm chart
• step CLI

What are Chainguard Containers?

Chainguard's free tier of Starter container images are built with Wolfi, our minimal Linux undistro.

All other Chainguard Containers are built with Chainguard OS, Chainguard's minimal Linux operating system designed to produce container images that meet the requirements of a more secure software supply chain.

The main features of Chainguard Containers include:

• Minimal design, without unnecessary software bloat
• Daily builds to ensure container images are up-to-date with available security patches
• High quality build-time SBOMs attesting to the provenance of all artifacts within the image
• Verifiable signatures provided by Sigstore
• Reproducible builds with Cosign and apko (read more about reproducibility)

For cases where you need container images with shells and package managers to build or debug, most Chainguard Containers come paired with a development, or -dev, variant.

In all other cases, including Chainguard Containers tagged as :latest or with a specific version number, the container images include only an open-source application and its runtime dependencies. These minimal container images typically do not contain a shell or package manager.

Although the -dev container image variants have similar security features as their more minimal versions, they include additional software that is typically not necessary in production environments. We recommend using multi-stage builds to copy artifacts from the -dev variant into a more minimal production image.

Need additional packages?

To improve security, Chainguard Containers include only essential dependencies. Need more packages? Chainguard customers can use Custom Assembly to add packages, either through the Console, chainctl, or API.

To use Custom Assembly in the Chainguard Console: navigate to the image you'd like to customize in your Organization's list of images, and click on the Customize image button at the top of the page.

Learn More

Refer to our Chainguard Containers documentation on Chainguard Academy. Chainguard also offers VMs and Libraries — contact us for access.

Trademarks

This software listing is packaged by Chainguard. The trademarks set forth in this offering are owned by their respective companies, and use of them does not imply any affiliation, sponsorship, or endorsement by such companies.