FastPKI is an enterprise Certificate Authority (CA) for organisations issuing certificates to servers, laptops, mobile devices, network equipment, and users.

It serves standard enrolment protocols natively, so no proprietary agents need to be installed on client devices. It supports Windows Autoenrolment, ACME, EST, SCEP, CMP, and OCSP/CRLs for revocation checking.

A single FastPKI instance can host multiple CAs. CA signing keys are secured inside Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), operational data is stored in PostgreSQL, and deployments can run active-active across multiple data centers.

• Language/Stack: C++20 on OpenSSL 3.5
• Architecture: One lightweight binary per protocol with a shared core library

• Native Protocol Support: Supports MS-XCEP/WSTEP for Windows domains, ACME for Linux and Unix servers, ACME with device attestation and SCEP for Macs, iPhones and iPads, SCEP for switches, firewalls and MDMs, CMP for industrial and telecom equipment, and EST for scripts.
• Windows, macOS, iOS, Linux and Unix: Windows domain members enrol themselves through autoenrolment. Macs, iPhones and iPads enrol from a configuration profile, downloaded ready-made from the console or delivered by an MDM platform; with ACME device attestation the device proves it is genuine Apple hardware and its key stays in the Secure Enclave. Linux and Unix hosts use any standard ACME, EST or CMP client.
• Microsoft Intune: Devices Intune manages, Android included, enrol over SCEP with the challenge Intune gives them; FastPKI has Intune validate each request and revokes what Intune retires. The Entra app signs in with a certificate FastPKI renews itself.
• One Policy for Every Protocol: Every protocol issues under the same policy, the same roles and the same audit trail.
• Pull-Based Model: Clients generate their own private keys and request certificates directly from the CA. The CA never initiates connections to target hosts.
• Minimal Firewall Exposure: Requires a single outbound rule to the CA rather than inbound rules for every managed host.
• Exceptions:
  • ACME Validation: http-01 and tls-alpn-01 challenges connect back to verify domain control (dns-01 does not).
  • EST Server Keygen: Allows key generation on the CA for devices that cannot generate a good key themselves (disabled by default).

• Token Protection: Every CA key exists solely as a PKCS#11 handle. fastpki-ca refuses key files.
• Secure Key Replication: Each node has its own token. A CA key reaches another node only by being replicated into that node's token over a mutually authenticated channel.
• On-Token Key Generation: Supports generating end-entity certificate keys directly inside the token, so nobody can copy them — including the requester.

• Multi-Master Replication: Nodes run active-active over PostgreSQL logical replication.
• Collision-Free Serials: Nodes assign serial numbers from dedicated ranges.
• High-Availability Revocation: Certificates list a CRL endpoint for every data center, for automatic fallback by relying parties. The OCSP endpoint names the issuing data center, or every data center once the OCSP responder keys are replicated to them.
• Unified Configuration: Roles, profiles, templates, approved domains, and user directories replicate across all data centers.

• ML-DSA Ready: Supports ML-DSA for both CA signing keys and end-entity certificates.
• Algorithm Compatibility: See docs/compatibility.md for client support for ML-DSA, Ed25519, Ed448, EC and RSA, and for the limits inside FastPKI itself.

• Data-Driven Policies: All profiles, roles, and domain restrictions are edited via the console and stored in PostgreSQL.
• Certificate Profiles: Define the names, key usages, and lifetimes a certificate may have. Roles grant profiles, and holding several combines what they allow.
• Active Directory Integration: Import and serve Windows templates directly from AD.
• Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Restrict roles to specific CAs, cap issuance quotas, and set approved-domain allowlists.

• Console Sign-In: Local accounts, LDAP/Active Directory, and single sign-on over OIDC or SAML (for example AD FS). Client certificates (mTLS) and API bearer tokens are also accepted. Passkeys sign in with Face ID, Touch ID or a device passcode, and an iPhone or iPad signs in like a smartcard with its attested device certificate and a PIN. The administrator chooses which of these the console accepts.
• Multiple Directories: Several directories can be connected at once. Names are provider-qualified (corp\alice), and an unqualified name always means a local account.
• Directory Groups: Roles can be granted to directory groups, so group membership decides what a user may do.
• Enrolment Authentication:
  • EST: HTTP Basic or a TLS client certificate.
  • Windows (MS-XCEP/WSTEP): Kerberos, HTTP Basic, or a WS-Security UsernameToken.
  • CMP: A per-user shared secret or a certificate signature.
  • SCEP: A per-user or one-time challenge password.
  • ACME: Account keys, with optional External Account Binding.
• Brute-Force Protection: Failed logins trigger a backoff that doubles per account and per address, instead of locking accounts out.
• Secure Defaults: The seeded administrator must set a new password before doing anything else, and no setting turns authentication off.

• Certificate Discovery: Scans IP addresses and CIDR ranges to map active certificates (including ones FastPKI never issued) and flag weak keys or deprecated algorithms.
• Automated Expiry Alerts: Triggers webhook notifications (JSON, Slack, Teams, ServiceNow) and email alerts to certificate owners at defined warning thresholds.
• Tamper-Evident Audit Log: Events are hash-chained to previous entries and validated with signed checkpoints. Supports direct forwarding to syslog and Splunk HEC.

• Clients Renew Themselves: ACME clients, EST re-enrolment, SCEP renewal, CMP key update and Windows autoenrolment all renew certificates without an administrator.
• Service Certificates Renew Themselves: A daily job renews the OCSP responder, CMP RA, SCEP RA and HTTPS certificates at 75% of their lifetime, and the running services pick up the renewal without a restart. It also replaces the self-signed certificates the services start with, and creates any missing credentials.
• Keys Converge on Their Own: In an HA pair, each host copies the CA keys it is missing from the other every night.
• Rolling Updates: rolling-update.sh applies schema changes first, then replaces the services one at a time.
• API and MCP: Everything the console does is available over its HTTP/JSON API, and fastpki-mcp exposes the certificate inventory to MCP clients (read-only unless MCP_ALLOW_WRITE is set).

• One Command, No Checkout: curl -fsSL <release URL> | bash downloads a release, checks its signature, and runs the install wizard.
• Unattended Installs: install.sh --answers <file> installs from an answers file. The next data center's file is the first one's with three values changed.
• Every Path Scripted: Kubernetes installs with deploy/k8s/apply.sh, and AWS from a machine image you build once and an OpenTofu module.
• HA and Mesh in One Command Each: deploy/ha-join-pair.sh joins a standby to its primary, and deploy/mesh-join.sh connects data centers into a mesh, both run from the operator's machine.

• Console & CLI Parity: Web console covers all administration tasks, with matching commands available in the CLI.
• Lightweight Footprint: 128 MB AlpineLinux image with no JVM or application server overhead.
• Flexible Deployment Options: Run via Docker Compose, Kubernetes, native Alpine + OpenRC, or a cloud image.
• Pluggable Tokens: Ships with a built-in software token; swap to a hardware HSM by setting PKCS11_MODULE to the vendor's module.

Database Note: PostgreSQL is the only supported database engine.

Known Limitation: MS-WSTEP does not sign its responses (no WS-Security signature or timestamp). The native Windows client accepts this, but relying parties requiring signed WSTEP responses are unsupported. See docs/user-guide.md §10.3.

Measured with demo/pki-bench.sh against a throwaway deployment inside the shipped Alpine image, on an Apple M1 (Docker Desktop, 4 vCPUs).

Single thread, so per core: the bench runs one client and sends one request at a time. Every figure is what one core delivers, not the capacity of a multi-core host. Each operation also includes the client's own process start and, for EST, a TLS handshake.

• Memory: Idle on a running Docker Compose deployment (docker stats, on a 2-vCPU server), each of the eight services uses 2–4 MiB, the token 14 MiB and PostgreSQL 63 MiB — about 100 MiB in all.
• ACME: not measured here; its bench leg drives certbot in a container of its own.

FastPKI is licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0. You are free to inspect, modify, and redistribute this software for noncommercial purposes. Commercial use requires a separate commercial licence from FastPKI.

• Compiled into binaries: cpp-httplib (MIT), nlohmann/json (MIT)
• Built from source and bundled: SoftHSMv2 (BSD 2-Clause), p11-kit (BSD 3-Clause), pkcs11-provider (Apache 2.0)
• Linked from Alpine packages: OpenSSL (Apache 2.0), libpq (PostgreSQL), OpenLDAP (OLDAP-2.8) with Cyrus SASL (BSD), MIT Kerberos (MIT), libxml2 (MIT), xmlsec (MIT) with libxslt (X11), zlib (Zlib), and the C and C++ runtimes, musl (MIT) and libstdc++ (GPL/LGPL)
• Also in the image, from Alpine packages: stunnel (GPL-2.0+ with the OpenSSL exception) for the key tunnel, and OpenSC (LGPL-2.1+) and the PostgreSQL client (PostgreSQL) for the deployment scripts

For full licensing notices, including every package each of those depends on, see NOTICE.md. Container deployments provide attribution at /app/NOTICE.md, individual project licences at /app/licences/, the licence texts of every Alpine package at /app/licences/alpine/, and the exact list of Alpine packages in the image, with versions and licences, at /app/licences/alpine-packages.txt.