Systems and methods for policy driven fine grain validation of servers' SSL certificate for clientless SSLVPN access

A method comprising:

• (a) receiving, by an intermediary device that is intermediary to a plurality of clients and a plurality of servers, a request to access a server of the plurality of servers via a clientless secure socket layer (SSL) virtual private network (VPN) connection;
• (b) accessing, by the intermediary device and responsive to the request, a plurality of preconfigured policies for use by the intermediary device to restrict SSL server certificate validation to a set of servers, from the plurality of servers, specified in the plurality of preconfigured policies, each preconfigured policy of the plurality of preconfigured policies specifying at least one respective server of the plurality of servers for which to apply SSL server certificate validation;
• (c) identifying, by the intermediary device, for the server of the request, a preconfigured policy from the plurality of preconfigured policies, the intermediate device configured to apply SSL certificate validation for the server if the preconfigured policy indicates that the server is to be validated using one or more certificate authority (CA) certificates that are a subset of a plurality of CA certificates available to the intermediary device, and to forego the SSL certificate validation for the server if otherwise;
• (d) performing, at the intermediary device responsive to the preconfigured policy indicating that the server is to be validated, validation of a SSL server certificate of the server using the one or more CA certificates specified by the preconfigured policy;
• and
• (e) establishing, by the intermediary device responsive to the SSL server certificate validation, the clientless SSL VPN connection with the server.