Istio Security: Zero-Trust Networking

**Executive summary:** This blog post explains Istio's security capabilities within a zero-trust model — including mutual TLS and certificate management, service identity (SVID), service-level RBAC, layer‑7 policy enforcement via Envoy, and traffic controls — and discusses how these features mitigate risks like microservice impersonation, unauthorized access, data exfiltration, and packet sniffing, while enabling application-level policy without modifying application code.