The Requirement involves implementing a client certificate-based access control system for the application. This system will authenticate and authorize users based on their individual client certificates presented from their respective machines. To illustrate this concept, consider a scenario with three distinct clients: John, Dave, and Eric. The main application URL is https://www.someapplication.com/. When John attempts to access the application using his unique client certificate, the system should automatically direct him to his personalized content at https://www.someapplication.com/john. Similarly, when Dave accesses the application with his certificate, he should be redirected to his specific content at https://www.someapplication.com/dave. This pattern continues for each authorized user, ensuring that everyone accessing the system is directed to their appropriate, personalized content area.

To implement this sophisticated access control mechanism, we are leveraging the Irule functionality, which provides powerful conditional logic capabilities for making precise authentication and routing decisions. The infrastructure architecture consists of three primary components working in harmony: an Ubuntu server functioning as the certificate authority for managing and issuing certificates, an F5 LTM loadbalancer for handling traffic distribution and certificate verification, and a backend apache server for hosting the actual application content.




Certificate Authority - Ubuntu Server

OpenSSL CA

Loadbalancer - F5 Device LTM

Backend Webservers - Apache Server



The implementation plan consists of several carefully orchestrated steps to establish a secure certificate-based authentication system. First, we will utilize the Ubuntu server as our certificate authority to generate both client and server certificates, ensuring proper cryptographic security and chain of trust. Following the certificate generation, we will proceed with importing these certificates into the F5 LTM device, which serves as our load balancer and traffic manager. Once imported, we will configure and apply these certificates to the Virtual IP (VIP) address, establishing the foundation for secure client connections. The final step involves deploying and configuring the certificates on the Apache server, completing the end-to-end secure communication chain. This systematic approach ensures proper certificate distribution and configuration across all components of our infrastructure.