Gregory Wessel Joins AKMSecure Board of Advisors

AKMSecure has added Gregory Wessel, Chief Technology Officer of the Technology Advancement Center (TAC), to its Board of Advisors. Wessel brings four decades of experience across the U.S. intelligence community and the commercial technology sector, with deep expertise in computer network operations and critical infrastructure defense.

A Career on Both Sides of the Network

Wessel spent the core of his career in U.S. government service, rising to technical executive leadership as a Technical Director in the System and Network Attack Center. There he helped pioneer Red Team and Blue Team methodologies across the Intelligence Community and worked across the full spectrum of computer network operations, from defense to exploitation to attack. Few practitioners understand how credentials are stolen and how networks are compromised as directly as someone who built those methods firsthand.

In the commercial sector, Wessel held senior roles at Bay Microsystems, Triumfant, and Nehemiah Security, and has advised cybersecurity, cloud, and data-analytics ventures as an independent technical consultant. Today, as CTO of TAC, he leads technology strategy and initiatives in operational technology and aviation cybersecurity, including the OT BoOTcamp and Defend the Airport programs.

Importance to the AKM Mission

Wessel's career maps directly to the problem AKM was built to solve. Attackers no longer need to break encryption when they can simply steal a credential and move laterally. AKM's Autonomous Key Management™ protocol removes that opening: every session is independently verified, with no persistent credentials to steal, reuse, or escalate. That is Zero Trust at the protocol layer.

His current focus on operational technology and critical infrastructure is just as relevant. These are the environments where PKI was never viable, leaving industrial and field systems without practical encryption. AKM fills that gap with an air-gapped-capable, lightweight architecture built to run where traditional certificate management could never reach.

"When you’ve spent your career building the attack, you have a very clear view of what defense actually requires. Greg has seen credential theft from both sides of the network - in intelligence community infrastructure, operational technology, and the tactical edge. These are places where PKI was never viable and where a compromised credential can have catastrophic consequences,” said Brian McGowan, CEO of AKMSecure. Greg’s expertise doesn't just inform our roadmap; it sharpens our focus on the missions where AKM's approach is most critical.

"I spent a significant part of my career finding and using the seams that credential-based systems leave open,” said Wessel. “When I looked at what AKMSecure built, I recognized something different — a protocol that eliminates the standing credentials that make lateral movement possible in the first place. That is not an incremental improvement. It is a fundamental shift in how trust gets established, and it works in the OT and tactical environments where that shift is most overdue."

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 certificate-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.