secured by default and that they can enforce these policies consistently across diverse protocols and runtimes.</p><p><strong>Strong service authentication</strong>: Istio authentication secures service communication using mutual TLS to ensure that the service identity is not expressed as a bearer token that can be stolen or replayed from another source. This ensures that services with sensitive data can only be accessed from strongly authenticated and authorized clients.</p><h2 id=join-us-in-this-journey>J