Similar to xref:servlet/authentication/x509.adoc#servlet-x509[Servlet X.509 authentication], reactive x509 authentication filter allows extracting an authentication token from a certificate provided by a client.
In the configuration above, when neither `principalExtractor` nor `authenticationManager` is provided defaults will be used. The default principal extractor is `SubjectDnX509PrincipalExtractor` which extracts the CN (common name) field from a certificate provided by a client. The default authentication manager is `ReactivePreAuthenticatedAuthenticationManager` which performs user account validation, checking that user account with a name extracted by `principalExtractor` exists and it is not locked, disabled, or expired.
The next example demonstrates how these defaults can be overridden.
In this example, a username is extracted from the OU field of a client certificate instead of CN, and account lookup using `ReactiveUserDetailsService` is not performed at all. Instead, if the provided certificate issued to an OU named "Trusted Org Unit", a request will be authenticated.
For an example of configuring Netty and `WebClient` or `curl` command-line tool to use mutual TLS and enable X.509 authentication, please refer to https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-security-samples/tree/main/servlet/java-configuration/authentication/x509.