Securing B2B communication with mTLS

Document updated on Apr 10, 2020

Mutual TLS authentication (mTLS) is an authentication mechanism used traditionally in business-to-business (B2B) applications where clients provide a certificate that allows to connect to the KrakenD server.

The certificates must be recognized by your system’s Certification Authority (CA). KrakenD relies on the machine where is running.

Configuring mutual authentication

From the configuration file perspective, Mutual TLS Authentication is no more than flag at the root level of the configuration.

When mTLS is enabled, all KrakenD endpoints require clients to provide a known client-side X.509 authentication certificate. KrakenD relies on the system’s CA to validate certificates.

To enable it you need to add enable_mtls to your tls configuration:

{
    "version": 3,
    "tls": {
      "public_key": "/path/to/cert.pem",
      "private_key": "/path/to/key.pem",
      "enable_mtls": true
    }
}

Connections not having a recognized certificate in KrakenD’s system CA, will be rejected. For further documentation on TLS, see the TLS documentation