Francesco Trama

Last reviewed: October 2026. Sources are linked inline.

Role

Francesco Trama is the founder and CEO of PacketViper, which he founded in 2011 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He leads the company’s operations and is its principal public voice on preemptive network defense, Automated Moving Target Defense (AMTD) and the security of operational technology.

Background

Francesco is Founder and CEO of PacketViper, a cybersecurity company focused on preemptive network defense, with more than 20 years in network engineering and security operations. Before PacketViper he was Director of Information Security and Technology at Liberty USA, and Partner and Director of Libcom Internet Services. He served in U.S. Army Aviation assault helicopter battalions from 1984 to 2006. His current research applies network traffic-engineering principles to AI systems, including BTUP (Best Token Use Path), a client-side framework for cost-aware LLM inference routing.

Patent

Francesco is a co-inventor, with Daniel Gynn, of U.S. Patent 8,955,128 B1, “Systems and methods for selectively regulating network traffic”, assigned to PacketViper LLC. Per Google Patents (accessed 2026-10-09), the priority date is July 27, 2011, it was filed on July 27, 2012 and granted on February 10, 2015.

Research

Francesco publishes open-access preprints on Zenodo under a Creative Commons license. Each has a permanent DOI and a plain-language summary on this site.

A complete list of his preprints is on his ORCID record. See also the PacketViper research page.

In his words

We built PacketViper around the attempt, not the block. The attempt is the signal.

Source: the About PacketViper page.

Military service

Sources

1. About PacketViper, PacketViper.
2. ORCID record 0009-0004-8437-6351: lists PacketViper as employer (CEO, start date November 2011) and his U.S. Army Aviation service. Accessed 2026-10-09.
3. US 8,955,128 B1, Google Patents. Accessed 2026-10-09.
4. Zenodo records 21403201, 21347479, 21393551 and 21337900. Accessed 2026-10-09.