Paul D. Martin, Ph.D.
Dr. Martin serves as both a testifying and consulting expert in complex software, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, embedded systems, and hardware-related litigation. His work focuses on helping attorneys, courts, and juries understand complex technical systems and the evidence they produce in high-stakes disputes. He is the Chief Scientist at Harbor Experts and a Lecturer in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University.
He has provided expert testimony 18 times across 4 trials, 2 evidentiary hearings, and 12 depositions in federal and state courts, the International Trade Commission, and inter partes reviews. His engagements have spanned matters involving major technology companies, criminal proceedings, and international disputes. Across more than 100 matters, he has led over 100 large-scale source code reviews involving systems ranging from thousands to billions of lines of code, reconstructing system behavior, development history, and technical provenance.
He earned his B.S., M.S.E., and Ph.D. in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University, where his doctoral research focused on securing medical devices and protecting patient privacy. He is a named inventor on five U.S. patents, a published researcher in embedded security and applied cryptography, and a former member of the program committee for the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
Litigation Experience
- 18 testimony appearances
- 12 depositions
- 4 trials
- 2 evidentiary hearings
- 100+ large-scale source code reviews
In the Media
The Asbury Park Press — photo gallery documenting the State of New Jersey v. Paul Caneiro case, 2018–2026 (April 2026)
Yahoo News — coverage of the State of New Jersey v. Paul Caneiro case
The Asbury Park Press — “DNA software used in Caneiro murder case is ‘quite good,’ expert says” (December 2024)
Al Jazeera America and Al Jazeera English (international) — television interview on medical device security (February 13, 2015)
The Washington Post — coverage of a Johns Hopkins University intersession course on Facebook application development (February 2009)
The Baltimore Sun — coverage of a Johns Hopkins University intersession course on Facebook application development (February 2009)
Expert Witness
Dr. Martin’s expert work spans software and firmware security, reverse engineering, source code analysis, cryptography, embedded systems, network protocols, and more. Attorneys have described his ability to teach complex technical concepts to judges and juries in a clear and approachable manner.
What distinguishes his practice is that he is not only an analyst — he has written production code deployed in FDA-regulated medical devices, identified and demonstrated remote code execution vulnerabilities in life-critical medical systems, and designed cryptographic protocols implemented in production healthcare environments. He designs and executes custom experiments to answer critical questions in litigation, and he can work cases where source code is lost or unavailable through binary reverse engineering and forensic reconstruction.
View all expert witness engagements →
Research & Innovation
Five threads run through Dr. Martin’s research and engineering work: source code analysis, security and cryptography, performance measurement and optimization, virtualization and hosting infrastructure, and full-stack systems engineering from hardware through application software.
He designed and led development of Firmware IQ, a commercial security analysis platform that scans firmware, containers, and virtual machine images for known vulnerabilities and cryptographic implementation flaws, cross-referencing findings against NIST’s National Vulnerability Database. He also designed Sentinel, a CPU add-on for IoT-class processors that enforces control-flow integrity on embedded devices. Both the integrated audit and access control system he developed (subsequently patented by Accenture) and the smart grid traffic profiling platform he built at Applied Communication Sciences (commercialized as part of their SecureSmart MSS product) grew directly from this work.
He designs, builds, and operates virtualization and hosting infrastructure for security research, AI inference, and expert witness work — currently consolidating what was previously an entire rack of dedicated appliances into a single Proxmox-based system that also serves as a local inference platform for frontier-class large language models. Over twenty years of hands-on performance measurement and tuning across embedded systems, network infrastructure, and datacenter hardware informs both his research and his expert analysis in litigation.
Teaching
At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Martin teaches C and C++ programming, computer and network security, and applied cryptography. His security courses have a significant source code analysis component: students read through real codebases to identify exploitable vulnerabilities, then write working exploits that leverage internal system-architecture knowledge to achieve code execution. This mirrors the analytical work he performs in litigation, where understanding how code actually behaves — not just what it is supposed to do — is critical.
Previously, he co-instructed a course on hardware hacking that received the highest student ratings in the Computer Science department during its session. He was awarded the Computer Science Department Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award in 2014.
Projects & Lab
Dr. Martin has hands-on experience across 16 CPU architectures — from 8-bit microcontrollers (6502, 8051, Z80, AVR, PIC) through embedded processors (ARM, MIPS, MSP430) to server-class systems (x86-64, SPARC, PowerPC) — and maintains a hardware analysis laboratory equipped with oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, microscopes, soldering and rework stations, and other diagnostic equipment used for component-level hardware investigation, firmware extraction, and forensic analysis.
Dr. Martin also maintains a technical laboratory site documenting systems research and hardware projects.