AKMSecure has appointed James F. (Jim) Carlini to its Board of Advisors. Carlini served as Leidos' Chief Technology Officer from 2019 through 2025 and continues to advise the company's CEO on national security matters. He brings four decades of defense technology leadership across DARPA, Northrop Grumman and Leidos, along with service on the Defense Science Board.
Four Decades of Defense Technology Leadership
As Leidos CTO, Carlini led corporate technology and engineering strategy, including internal R&D and technology partnerships with commercial, university, venture and federally funded research organizations. His portfolio spanned cyber, AI/ML, electronic warfare, sensors and integrated defense platforms.
Earlier, Carlini founded and directed the Special Projects Office at DARPA, managing technology and advanced system investments against challenges that included GPS jamming mitigation, space control, cruise missile defense and tactical sensing from space. He later served as Vice President of Advanced Development Programs at Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems.
Carlini was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2026, has served on the Defense Science Board, and is a former member of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board and the Army Science Board.
Importance to the AKM Mission
Carlini has spent his career fielding hardened, secure systems, and on the harder problem that comes after: how those systems operate through disruption, once an adversary adapts and counters it. That problem is growing. AI is shortening the time between finding a vulnerability and exploiting it, and quantum computing will eventually threaten the cryptography most networks depend on today. Autonomous Key Management™ was built for that reality. Forward-deployed radios, unmanned systems and satellites often run where a certificate authority is out of reach, and no single compromise can be allowed to spread. AKM gives each relationship its own credentials and refreshes sessions on its own. It also lets operators isolate a compromised node within moments while new keys are established in the remaining devices, even in disconnected environments.
AKM reaches the defense market through prime integrators and authorized implementation partners. Carlini set technology strategy at one of the largest of those integrators, so he brings AKM a direct view of how primes evaluate, pilot and adopt new security technology across their programs.
“Jim has worked at the point where national security requirements meet the engineering that has to satisfy them, from building an office at DARPA to setting technology strategy at Leidos,” said Brian McGowan, CEO of AKMSecure. “He knows how to field secure systems that can take a hit and keep operating, and how integrators bring new technology into their programs. That perspective is directly relevant as we bring AKM to defense platforms that have to keep communicating securely when they are disconnected or under attack.”
“Every system I’ve helped field was built to be as hard to break as we could make it, and every one was built knowing that eventually someone might get in anyway,” said Carlini. “With AI speeding up attacks and quantum computing on the horizon, what matters more and more is how fast you can adapt when a compromise happens. What drew me to AKM is that it treats rapid recovery as part of the design. Losing one device doesn’t mean losing the network. The architecture is built for the quantum computing age and does not rely on certificate infrastructure. Operators can cut off a compromised node and the rest of the network is automatically rekeyed.”
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.
