The Fusion API gateway requires incoming requests to be authenticated. The gateway supports a variety of authentication mechanisms, including Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), OpenID Connect (OIDC), Kerberos, and Basic authentication. Once authenticated, the gateway issues a JWT and returns it in the id cookie. Client applications get the best performance by using the id cookie (or JWT Authorization header) instead of using Basic authentication for every query request. Verifying a JWT is fast and safe to cache. Hashing a password is CPU intensive and slow. (Fusion uses bcrypt.) All Fusion services require requests to include a JWT to identify the caller.