Dr. Chase Cunningham Joins AKMSecure Board of Advisors

AKMSecure has appointed Dr. Chase Cunningham to its Board of Advisors, adding one of the most recognized voices in Zero Trust strategy to the company at a time when the market is demanding real execution, not more cybersecurity theater.

Career Highlights

Known to many as DrZeroTrust, Cunningham is the creator of the Zero Trust Extended (ZTX) Framework, developed during his time as a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. That framework helped shape how enterprises, government agencies, and defense organizations think about Zero Trust architecture and, more importantly, how they operationalize it.

Cunningham brings more than two decades of cybersecurity leadership spanning national security, enterprise technology, and executive strategy. Before his work in industry, he spent over 13 years at the National Security Agency as a Chief Cryptologic Technician, supporting cyber threat intelligence, network forensics, and operational cyber missions across the U.S. intelligence community. He later held executive leadership roles including Chief Strategy Officer positions at Ericom Software and Demo-Force.com, while also advising senior leaders across defense and critical infrastructure.

He is also the host of the DrZeroTrust podcast and a widely recognized author and speaker known for cutting through cyber hype and focusing on what actually works. 

Importance to the AKM Mission

Dr. Cunningham joins AKMSecure at a pivotal moment. The market has spent years talking about Zero Trust, but most organizations are still struggling with the hard part: making it real inside live environments where credentials, keys, and trust assumptions remain soft targets.

That is where AKMSecure fits.

AKM’s Autonomous Key Management™ approach addresses one of the core weaknesses in modern cybersecurity architecture: persistent credentials and inherited trust at the protocol layer. By enabling dynamic, independently verified sessions without standing privileges, AKM helps move Zero Trust from PowerPoint into production.

“Chase helped define how the cybersecurity industry thinks about Zero Trust,” said Brian McGowan, CEO of AKMSecure. “His perspective is grounded in operational reality, and that is exactly what we need as we scale technology designed to make Zero Trust enforceable, measurable, and practical for customers.”

“Most organizations still have too much implied trust buried inside their infrastructure, especially around credentials and access,” said Dr. Chase Cunningham. “AKM is taking aim at one of the toughest problems in cybersecurity: removing those assumptions and making trust continuously earned instead of permanently granted. That is the kind of work that actually matters.” 

About AKMSecure

AKMSecure delivers a patented Autonomous Key Management™ protocol built to replace outdated PKI approaches with a dynamic, quantum-secure, air-gapped-capable architecture. Instead of relying on persistent credentials that can be stolen, reused, or abused, AKM enables independently verified sessions with no standing privileges left behind. The result is a model that better aligns with Zero Trust principles, reduces credential-based risk, and supports resilient operations across enterprise IT, OT and Tactical Edge environments. Built to NSA-grade security standards and deployable as a lightweight SDK, AKMSecure helps organizations modernize trust at the protocol layer without rebuilding everything around it.