Mutual authentication or two-way authentication refers to two parties authenticating each other at the same time. Below is an excerpt from the Wikipedia page, they did a nice job explaining what mutual authentication is.
By default the TLS protocol only proves the identity of the server to the client using X.509 certificate and the authentication of the client to the server is left to the application layer (for example, username and passwords.) TLS also offers client-to-server authentication using client-side X.509 authentication. As it requires provisioning of the certificates to the clients and involves less user-friendly experience, it's rarely used in end-user applications. But at a small scale or proof of concept this is completely reasonable.
Mutual TLS authentication (mTLS) is much more widespread in business-to-business (B2B) applications, where a limited number of programmatic and homogeneous clients are connecting to specific web services, the operational burden is limited, and security requirements are usually much higher as compared to consumer environments. The factor that impacts scaling of this design is not the technology, devices are built to handle millions of SSL transactions, but the policy and procedures around the certificate management and client on-boarding.
In this example a client will be connecting to an Apache web server and authenticate using mutual TLS authentication.
First you must build the web server running SSL. You can find a lot of step by step articles online about how to build an Apache web server preferably on Linux. Also take a look at Lets Encrypt, it's a free SSL certificate issuer that is freaking awesome.
Once you have your web server up and running you will want your client to generate a certificate. This can be done using OpenSSL the de facto for everything SSL on the internet. There are some awesome guides on how to build out the mutual SSL authentication and the accompanying Apache config. The best one I found was on stefanocapitanio.com they do a great job of outlining each step that makes up the mutual TLS authentication. In this example I will Jump ahead to the certificate creation,
This will generate your private key and certificate. You will need to answer the following questions when prompted this makes up the attributes of your client certificate.
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Here is an example what it will look like.
You are about to be asked to enter information that will be incorporated
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
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Country Name (2 letter code) []:US
State or Province Name (full name) []:State
Locality Name (eg, city) []:City
Organization Name (eg, company) []:Anything
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Anything
Common Name (eg, fully qualified host name) []:Username
Email Address []:youremail
into your certificate request.
What you are about to enter is what is called a Distinguished Name or a DN.
There are quite a few fields but you can leave some blank
For some fields there will be a default value,
If you enter '.', the field will be left blank.
-----
Country Name (2 letter code) []:US
State or Province Name (full name) []:State
Locality Name (eg, city) []:City
Organization Name (eg, company) []:Anything
Organizational Unit Name (eg, section) []:Anything
Common Name (eg, fully qualified host name) []:Username
Email Address []:youremail
Next we will combine the Key and Certificate in PKCS#12 file:
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Once you have generated and installed your client certificate you will want to send ONLY THE PUBLIC CERTIFICATE, in this case client-certificate.pem to the server admin. Your public certificate will be what is used to identify your machine when it attempts to connect tot he web server. Read up on the Apache man pages about he SSLVerifyClient options there is quit a but out there. This is a very basic config.
The server admin will place your certificate in their certificate store and configure Apache.
<VirtualHost *:443> ServerName secure.example.com DocumentRoot "/var/www/html" ServerAdmin [email protected] SSLEngine on SSLCertificateFile /home/sempla1/ssl/server-cert.pem SSLCertificateKeyFile /home/sempla1/ssl/private/server-key.pem SSLVerifyClient require SSLVerifyDepth 10 SSLCACertificateFile /home/sempla1/ssl/client-certificate.pem </VirtualHost> |
That's it I had a good time playing with this I hope you do as well.
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