Mutual Transport Layer Security

In this article, we will under MTLS and how it can be used to secure and encrypt the data in transit. We will also see how it can be used as a mutual authentication mechanism between two applications.

“Enabling HTTPS on the server is called one-way TLS, but if client has to identify itself its called two-way TLS”

We will be using spring boot for demonstrating the example and understand the whole concept in detail.

Securing Transport Layer

We will understand the concept using Spring boot. Let's understand two common types of certificates used in the industry and how we can generate it.

Let understand first the difference between Truststore and Keystore. Truststore is used to store certificates from trusted Certificate authorities (CA) which are used to verify the certificate presented by Server in SSL connection. While Keystore is used to store private keys and own identity certificate which applications will present to other parties.

Java comes with a tool called keytool which can be used to generate the certificate. There are commonly two types of certificate formats JKS and…