David Goldschlag

Onion Routing at the Naval Research Laboratory

Goldschlag worked at the National Security Agency and the US Naval Research Laboratory early in his career. At the laboratory he co-invented onion routing, the technology that later became the foundation for Tor. On his Forbes Councils profile he writes: I’ve spent my career building technologies that challenge assumptions in security and identity.

New Edge Labs, MobileSpaces, and Netskope

He and Kevin Sapp have worked together for nearly two decades. They co-founded the mobile device management company Trust Digital, which McAfee acquired, and New Edge Labs, a zero trust network access company that Netskope acquired in 2019. Goldschlag also co-founded MobileSpaces, which Pulse Secure acquired, and held leadership roles at Netskope, Pulse Secure, McAfee, and USinternetworking.

At New Edge, he told Okta Ventures, customers kept asking about something the company did not cover: What about workload-to-workload access? He and Sapp left Netskope in the summer of 2021 to answer that question, and they founded Aembit.

Manage Access, Not Secrets

Goldschlag argues that the API keys and passwords software uses to reach other software are the weak point. In the Okta Ventures interview he said secrets are brittle and hard to manage. More importantly, you really don’t want to manage secrets; you want to manage access. He pointed to secrets left in the clear in a GitHub repository, or worse, the Post-It note on your DevOps engineer’s monitor.

He now applies the same argument to AI agents. On Forbes Councils he writes that workloads, APIs, service accounts, and AI agents drive access to data across enterprises and that securing them demands technical & cultural innovation and a new way of thinking that applies the rigor of user IAM to the non-human world.