Sunil Gentyala

Sunil Gentyala is Lead Cybersecurity and AI Security Consultant at HCLTech, where he leads an 11-person security team serving Fortune 500 clients including Uber, Disney, and Royal Caribbean. He serves as HCLTech's designated expert representative to the Cloud Security Alliance and is Security Architect and Framework Designer for HCLTech's AIDefendX initiative.

He is the creator of ContextGuard, a zero-trust middleware framework for Model Context Protocol (MCP) security, and the GSH Framework (Gentyala-Sovereign Hunt), an agentic AI threat hunting framework mapped to MITRE ATLAS and NIST CSF 2.0.

His research spans adversarial machine learning, MCP vulnerability analysis, post-quantum cryptography, and agentic AI governance. He holds over 20 years of enterprise PKI and security architecture experience and has published across SC World, Dark Reading, SecurityWeek, Infosecurity Magazine, Security Boulevard, and the Cloud Security Alliance. He holds a #FoundryExpert designation across IDG/Foundry publications (CSO Online, CIO.com, Computerworld).

He is an IEEE Senior Member (No. 101760715, ORCID: 0009-0005-2642-3479), active ISACA Professional Member (ID: 2297870), and is pursuing IET Fellowship (FIET).

Timeline

2026 April
🥉 Bronze — Cybersecurity Professional of the Year at the 2026 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards
2026 April
Shortlisted for Cyber Security Influencer of the Year at the Cyber Security Awards 2026
2026 April
Nominated for the Alan Turing Cyber Leadership Award at the National Cyber Awards — under expert judging panel review
2026 April
Published MCP security analysis at SC World on Model Context Protocol attack vectors and zero-trust mitigations
2026 April
Submitted multi-venue paper package — A Post-Quantum Migration Taxonomy for Model Context Protocol — to IEEE TIFS, ACM QSec, and Elsevier FGCS
2026 March
CSA Peer Review completed — MLOps Key Activities, Cloud Security Alliance
2026 March
Published LLM Jailbreak Survey to Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19241166) and SSRN
2026 March
GSH Framework reached v1.0.0-beta with full playbook set and CI workflow
2026 February
CSA Peer Review completed — IAM Standards and Protocols
2026 February
CSA Peer Review completed — Post-Quantum Cryptography Key Management
2026 February
ContextGuard published at GitHub with v1.0.0-ieee-submission release tag
2026 April
Invited as peer reviewer at the Cyber Defense Review — peer-reviewed scholarly journal of the U.S. Army Cyber Institute at West Point
2026 January
Submitted paper to IEEE SmartNets 2026Identity 3.0 and Zero-Trust for Critical Infrastructure, introducing the IMM-CI maturity model (EDAS ID 69662X)
2025 December
Completed peer review for EJCSI-2026-03-024; registered on Web of Science / Publons
2025 December
Completed BCS Fellowship application (Experiential route)
2025 November
Submitted paper to IEEE QCE26Post-Quantum Zero-Trust Migration Framework (QZTMF), co-author John Martin (HCLTech Auckland), QNET track
2025 October
ISACA Journal article — Governing Agentic AI via MCP and COBIT 2019 / NIST CSF 2.0, co-authored with Praveen Kumar Mannam (Salesforce)
2025 September
Zero-trust data pipelines paper submitted to JRTCSE, co-authored with Sunil Kumar Mudusu (Church Mutual Insurance)
2025 August
Elevated to IEEE Senior Member — No. 101760715
2025 July
Appointed as HCLTech designated expert representative to the Cloud Security Alliance

Publications

A Post-Quantum Migration Taxonomy for Model Context Protocol: Applying RFC 9794 PQ/T Hybrid Constructs to Agentic AI Infrastructure
Sunil Gentyala
Under review — IEEE TIFS / ACM QSec / Elsevier FGCS, 2026
LLM Jailbreak Survey: Adversarial Prompting, Attack Taxonomies, and Defense Frameworks
Sunil Gentyala
Zenodo, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19241166; SSRN, 2026
Governing Agentic AI via Model Context Protocol and COBIT 2019 / NIST CSF 2.0
Sunil Gentyala, Praveen Kumar Mannam
ISACA Journal, 2026
Hardware-Enforced Runtime Containment for Agentic AI Systems
Sunil Gentyala
IEEE TEMSCON Global 2026 / ACM CCS 2026 / USENIX Security 2026
Identity 3.0 and Zero-Trust for Critical Infrastructure: The IMM-CI Maturity Model
Sunil Gentyala
IEEE SmartNets 2026 (EDAS ID 69662X)
Post-Quantum Zero-Trust Migration Framework (QZTMF)
Sunil Gentyala, John Martin
IEEE QCE26 — QNET Track, 2026
Zero-Trust Data Pipelines for Enterprise Security Architecture
Sunil Gentyala, Sunil Kumar Mudusu
Journal of Research in Technology, Computers, and Security Engineering (JRTCSE), 2025
ContextGuard: Zero-Trust Middleware for Model Context Protocol Security
Sunil Gentyala, Ch Srinivas, Raghu Dhumpati
IEEE S&P 2027 target — github.com/sunilgentyala/contextguard
See all publications on Zenodo and ORCID.