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At a Glance
Raza Sharif, founder and CEO of CyberSecAI Ltd, has been named Cybersecurity & AI Architecture Executive of the Year 2026 by C-Suite Insider.
CyberSecAI's AgentPass platform issues CA-backed X.509 certificates to AI agents, becoming the first to issue production-grade PKI certificates for AI agent identity.
Sharif authored MCPS (MCP Secure), a cryptographic signing protocol published as an IETF Internet-Draft, now integrated into Cisco's AI defence capabilities.
Sharif holds multiple patent filings, and serves as a trusted advisor to UK Government departments on secure AI deployment.
CyberSecAI Ltd, a London-based AI security company, has announced that its founder and CEO Raza Sharif has been named Cybersecurity & AI Architecture Executive of the Year 2026 by C-Suite Insider. The recognition follows Sharif's work securing enterprise AI agent deployments across government and private sector organisations, and comes during a period of significant technical achievement for CyberSecAI, which has built what it describes as the first end-to-end cryptographic identity platform for autonomous AI agents.
Closing the Identity Gap in AI Agents
As organisations accelerate AI agent deployment, a critical gap has emerged: agents that execute code, access sensitive data, approve transactions, and communicate with other agents often operate without verifiable identity. Industry data cited in the announcement shows 88 percent of enterprises have experienced AI agent security incidents, while only 21.9 percent treat agents as independent identity-bearing entities.
CyberSecAI's AgentPass platform addresses this by issuing real CA-backed X.509 certificates to AI agents, providing per-action digital signing, graduated trust levels, sanctions screening, and tamper-evident audit trails. The platform recently completed integration with a global certificate authority, making it the first to issue production-grade PKI certificates for AI agent identity. AgentPass operates across a five-level trust model, from L0 (unknown, sandboxed) through to L4 (critical actions requiring human approval via a hardware device), with every agent action cryptographically signed and recorded in a hash-chained ledger that provides forensic-grade evidence of what each agent did, when, and whether it was authorised.
MCPS Protocol Adopted in Enterprise AI Security
Sharif is the author of MCPS (MCP Secure), a cryptographic signing protocol for AI agent communications published as an IETF Internet-Draft in March 2026. MCPS adds per-message signing, replay protection, and tool integrity verification to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard connecting AI systems to enterprise tools and data sources. MCPS-based security controls have since been integrated into Cisco's AI defence capabilities, strengthening the security posture of enterprise AI deployments that rely on MCP for agent-to-tool communication, addressing a fundamental gap in MCP's original design, which provided no native mechanism for message authentication or agent identity verification.
Sharif has published five IETF Internet-Drafts covering agent message signing, payment authorisation, agent identity, audit trails, and a new X.509 certificate profile specifically designed for AI agent identity, the first standard of its kind.
A Trusted Advisory Role
Sharif serves as a trusted advisor to UK Government departments and private sector organisations on the secure deployment of enterprise AI systems. CyberSecAI delivers advanced training in AI security, agent security, MCP security, and DevSecOps to enterprise teams internationally, with programmes covering AI threat modelling through to hands-on agent deployment with cryptographic identity.
Sharif previously co-led the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard for AI (AISVS) to its v1.0 release, contributing readability improvements across all 14 chapters of the standard. His security research includes CVE-2026-39313, a high-severity vulnerability in the MCP framework, and coordinated disclosures across the broader MCP SDK ecosystem. He holds 25 patent filings covering agent payments, behavioural enforcement, cryptographic identity, and post-quantum key exchange, alongside FBCS, CISSP, and CSSLP certifications, and is the published author of Breach 20/20 on data breach prevention.
About CyberSecAI Ltd
CyberSecAI is an AI security company based in London. It builds trust infrastructure for AI agents, including identity, signing, behavioural enforcement, and payment verification, and delivers hands-on AI security training and consulting to enterprises adopting agentic AI.
Further information is available at agentpass.co.uk, with training details at cybersecai.co.uk/training. Media enquiries can be directed to Raza Sharif at raza@cybersecai.co.uk or by phone at +44 7707 198123.
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