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Mutual TLS

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What is Mutual TLS?

Percolate uses TLS to securely authenticate the server a client is communicating with. For example, when you make a request to https://percolate.com/ we present a server certificate that can be used to verify that you're actually communicating with Percolate. Mutual TLS is a feature of the TLS protocol that allows for authentication of the requesting client via a client certificate.

As a user of Percolate's webhook system, you may want an extra layer of authentication to validate that the events your server receives are coming from Percolate. When the "enable mutual TLS setting" is enabled on a webhook subscription, Percolate will include the client certificate in the request when delivering an event.

On your TLS-terminating server, you will need to configure it to ask for a client certificate whenever you get a request and validate the certificate against the right DigiCert CA certificate. The following are the steps to get mutual TLS working:

Setting up Mutual TLS

  1. Enable mutual TLS on your webhook subscription
    Go to Settings > Developer > Manage webhooks and find the webhook subscription you want to configure. On the webhook subscription's details page, there will be a setting Enable mutual TLS. Set its value to Yes and then save the changes.

  2. Configure your server

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-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
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  • Enable client certificate verification on your server, setting the verification depth to 2. The server should also be configured to verify the client certificates against the CA cert bundle Percolate-Webhook-CA-Chain.pem.

  • Since any certificate that's been signed by this DigiCert CA would be valid, you must additionally verify that the subject distinguished name of the client certificate matches the following /C=US/ST=New York/L=New York/O=Percolate Industries, Inc./CN=Percolate Industries, Inc..

Nginx is a commonly used web server. The following is an example configuration:

server {
    listen 80 ssl;
    charset utf-8;

    ssl_verify_client on;
    ssl_client_certificate /etc/nginx/certificates/Percolate-Webhook-CA-Chain.pem;
    ssl_verify_depth 2;

    location / {
        if ($ssl_client_verify != SUCCESS) {
            return 403;
        }

        if ( $ssl_client_s_dn != "/C=US/ST=New York/L=New York/O=Percolate Industries, Inc./CN=Percolate Industries, Inc." ){
            return 400;
        }
    }

}

To make debugging easier, make sure to return helpful HTTP status codes and response messages when a certificate you receive in the request isn't valid.

Updated over 3 years ago