Mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) is a process that establishes an encrypted TLS connection in which both parties use X.509 digital certificates to authenticate each other.
MTLS can help mitigate the risk of moving services to the cloud and can help prevent malicious third parties from imitating genuine apps.
By default, the TLS protocol only proves the server’s identity to the client using X.509 certificates, and the client authentication to the server is left to the application layer.
TLS protocol also offers client-to-server authentication using client-side X.509 authentication. As it requires provisioning of the certificates to the clients and involves a less user-friendly experience, it’s rarely used in end-user applications.
Mutual TLS authentication is often used in business-to-business (B2B) applications, where a limited number of programmatic and homogeneous clients connect to specific web services, the operational burden is limited, and security requirements are usually much higher as compared to consumer environments.
mTLS protects against a variety of attacks, including:
As noted earlier, mTLS relies on certificates. A certificate represents each party’s identity. Without it, they have no way of proving they are approved to access the requested resources. The handshake relies on a cryptography standard known as X.509. It is a standard that defines the format of public-key certificates. There are three types of certificates each of which meets this standard.
Root CA Certificate:
The certificate is used to determine which certificate authority signed the client certificate. The server uses it to determine if the client should be trusted. The certificate meets the X.509 standard.
Client and Server Certificate:
Both the client and server use secure certificates that also meet the X.509 standard.
With mutual authentication, a connection can occur only when the client trusts the server’s digital certificate and the server trusts the client’s certificate. The exchange of certificates is carried out using the TLS protocol.
The client’s digital certificate and private key are kept in a Keystore. If the Keystore contains more than one signed certificate, the certificate with the latest timestamp is used to authenticate the client to the server.
Mutual authentication reduces the risk that a network user inadvertently reveals security information to a malicious or insecure website. Fraudulent email messages may still appear in a user’s inbox.
In practice, mTLS can identify and authorize the following:
A perfect use case for mTLS is an e-commerce platform that uses a CDN to help deliver its website to customers around the world.
A visitor to the site performs a standard (one-way authenticated) TLS connection with the CDN, but the CDN performs a mutual (two-way authenticated) connection to the “origin” web server.
The e-commerce website does not want or need to perform cryptographic authentication with any customer. It is important, however, for the CDN and origin server to authenticate each other. This allows both parties to be sure that no interception is occurring that might allow an attacker to deliver malicious content to customers.
References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_authentication
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