Mar 27, 2026 - For details about updated CVE-2025-53521 (BIG-IP APM vulnerability), refer to K000156741.

Creating, Importing and Assigning a CA Certificate Bundle

Within this article, I will be using a personal and relative use case to my own customers. While many organizations may only have one or two Root CA's to identify, the US Department of Defense has nu...
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Steve_Lyons's avatar
Ret. Employee
My name is Steve Lyons and I reside in Tampa, FL with my 3 children, wife and Frenchie. We live the typical Florida life of swimming, fishing, boating, and BBQ. I started my F5 journey as a customer in 2009 where I was first introduced to it as a "load balancer." I have since deployed and maintained all modules realizing the BIG-IP is so much more. I joined F5 in 2015 where I have made it a personal mission to educate as many people as I can so they too can take advantage of the tremendous potential of the BIG-IP.
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Steve_Lyons
Ret. Employee
Jan 07, 2019

Good question. In a scenario where you configure request versus require, you are potentially allowing a secondary authentication method if the client does not present a client certificate. In the event a client certificate is presented even if it is set to request, the SSL Client profile will validate the certificate was issued by a CA in that bundle. If it was not, it will either deny access or you can configure the VPE to allow another authentication method. If I get around to it, I will provide a VPE screenshot that has this scenario.

 

If this is an Access Policy that is ONLY configured for non-certificate-based authentication (AD, LDAP, Forms, etc.), this setting is not required.