A content delivery network based (CDN-based) access control method, includes receiving, by a CDN server, a hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) request from a user terminal and identification information of the user terminal, where the HTTP request includes an access ticket, sending the identification information of the user terminal and the HTTP request to a service server, receiving an HTTP response including a content fingerprint when an authentication result indicating that the access ticket is valid, obtaining the content resource according to the content fingerprint, and sending the content resource to the user terminal.