Paul D. Martin, Ph.D.
Dr. Martin is a Lecturer in Computer Science at Johns Hopkins University and the Chief Scientist at Harbor Experts. He 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 has provided expert testimony in federal and state courts, the International Trade Commission, and inter partes reviews, in matters involving major technology companies, criminal proceedings, and international disputes. Across more than one hundred matters, he has led large-scale source code reviews of 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, advised by Dr. Aviel D. Rubin, 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.
Expert Witness
What sets Dr. Martin’s practice apart is that he is not only an analyst: he has built the kinds of systems he is retained to examine — including production code in FDA-regulated medical devices — designs custom experiments to answer the questions in dispute, and reconstructs system behavior from binaries when source code is lost or unavailable.
His litigation record to date:
- 18 testimony appearances
- 12 depositions
- 4 trials
- 2 evidentiary hearings
- 100+ large-scale source code reviews
Dr. Martin accepts expert witness and consulting engagements through Harbor Experts.
View expert witness experience →
Research & Innovation
Dr. Martin’s research and engineering span source code analysis, security and cryptography, performance measurement, virtualization and hosting infrastructure, and full-stack systems engineering from hardware through application software. His current focus is software supply-chain security: in a modern supply chain, a component’s version number is a poor guide to whether it is actually vulnerable, because enterprise Linux distributions ship soft-forked packages whose incomplete backports let real exposure drift from upstream.
He designed and led development of Firmware IQ, a commercial platform that scans firmware, containers, and virtual machine images for known vulnerabilities against NIST’s National Vulnerability Database, and Sentinel, a CPU add-on that enforces control-flow integrity on embedded devices; earlier systems he built were patented by Accenture and commercialized by Applied Communication Sciences.
His current research measures how far enterprise distributions diverge from upstream and motivates the Linux distribution he is now building to close the gap. That work runs on virtualization and hosting infrastructure he designs and operates for security research, AI inference, and expert engagements, informed by more than twenty years of performance measurement and tuning.
Teaching
At Johns Hopkins, Dr. Martin teaches C and C++ programming, computer and network security, and applied cryptography — courses built around hands-on analysis of real codebases, the same discipline he applies in litigation. He co-instructed a hardware-hacking course that earned the department’s highest student ratings and received the Computer Science Department’s Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award in 2014.
Projects
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.
In the Media
The Asbury Park Press — photo chronology of the State of New Jersey v. Paul Caneiro case (April 2026)
The Asbury Park Press — reporting on Dr. Martin’s testimony: “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)
Dr. Martin also maintains TechniComp, an independent site documenting his personal technical, hardware, and restoration projects — separate from his professional and expert work.