`step certificate inspect` should support using StartTLS

Aperta
  • Qualcosa non va?
#1,479 1 commento 0 reazioni 1 assegnatario Vedi su GitHub

I maintainer di solito rispondono entro 1 giorno

@darkfronza ci sta già lavorando.

Dal 4/9/2025.

Valutazione

Questa issue non è ancora stata valutata.

Descrizione

enhancement needs triage

Hello!

  • Vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction
  • If you want to implement this feature, comment to let us know (we'll work with you on design, scheduling, etc.)

Issue details

It would a nice addition to support inspecting certificates that use explicit TLS (StartTLS negotiates a potential upgrade to TLS from a cleartext connection), which could use a flag like --starttls to indicate the connection uses StartTLS instead of implicit TLS:

step certificate inspect --starttls smtp.example.com:587

Related was an issue that lead to adding a smtps:// scheme prefix implying port 465 (implicit TLS), but SMTPS was commonly associated to implicit TLS equivalent to port 25 (StartTLS), however in 2018 was reassigned via RFC 8314 as the implicit TLS equivalent to the submission port (587 with StartTLS). So I don't know how much value that's providing vs just being explicit with a port number 😅 (there's help output with the smtps:// scheme, but no indication of the associated port)

Why is this needed?

The main benefit is it would not require an alternative tool to acquire a certificate from services only reachable via StartTLS:

openssl s_client -starttls smtp -connect smtp.example.com:587

StartTLS is often found with mail servers (aka explicit TLS via ports 25 and 587 related to SMTP and 110 + 143 for POP3/IMAP), which don't always offer implicit TLS ports (465, 993, 995). It can also be found elsewhere like Postgres databases (although this now offers implicit TLS too).

From what I understand however, supporting StartTLS varies by protocol, so implementing support may not be worth the effort/maintenance burden if it cannot be offloaded via some existing library? OpenSSL documents a -starttls option with a fairly long list of supported protocols.

Lingua principale
Go
Stelle
4.3k
Fork
320
Merge medio
2g 3h
PR unite (30g)
11

Preparare l'ambiente

Come iniziare

  1. Leggi tutta la issue e poi la guida ai contributi del progetto.
  2. Commenta sulla issue per dire che te ne occupi tu — evita che due persone facciano lo stesso lavoro.
  3. Fai un fork del repository e lavora su un branch.
  4. Apri una pull request che faccia riferimento al numero della issue.

Altre issue di smallstep/cli

Tutte le issue di smallstep/cli

Issue simili

Altre issue su Go

Ricevi le nuove issue nella tua casella

Un breve riepilogo di issue GitHub adatte ai principianti.