Smallstep Certificate Manager Private ACME Server

Automatically manage certificates on internal websites, servers, and the entire ACME ecosystem with Smallstep Certificate Manager.

Create your own private ACME server in three simple steps

About ACME

At a high level, ACME is pretty simple. An ACME client creates an account with an ACME server and submits a certificate order. The server responds with a set of challenges for the client to complete to prove control over identifiers (domain names) in the certificate. Once the client successfully completes these challenges, it submits a certificate signing request (CSR) and the server issues a certificate.

The most interesting part of all of this is the challenge – where the client proves control over an identifier. There is no single standard way to “prove control” over an “identifier”, so the core ACME specification makes this an extension point. Smallstep supports all the popular ACME challenges including DNS, HTTP, ALPN, IP, and EAB configurations.

ACME Challenge Verification

When public ACME Certificate Authorities (CA) like Let's Encrypt issue certificates to clients in the Web PKI, the CA depends heavily on public DNS for client verification. To get a certificate, a client must prove to the CA that it either directly controls the public DNS records for a domain (for the DNS-01 challenge type) or controls the IP address pointed to by public DNS records (for the HTTP-01 and TLS-ALPN-01 challenge types).

When deploying ACME internally, the same constraints are true: The ACME server that authorizes certificate requests must be able to query internal DNS servers or reach internal hosts. This is why we created a Registration Authority (RA) for Certificate Manager. An RA is a service you run on your own network that authenticates ACME challenges (or other certificate requests). It does not issue certificates or hold CA keys. Instead, it relays authenticated certificate requests to Certificate Manager, which then issues certificates.

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