Domenic Forte

Domenic Forte received the B.S. degree from the Manhattan College (now called Manhattan University) in 2006, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Maryland at College Park in 2010 and 2013, respectively, all in electrical engineering. He is currently a Professor and the Steven A. Yatauro Faculty Fellow with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Florida (UF) where he is also Associate Director for the Florida Institute for National Security (FINS). Prior to joining UF, he was an Assistant Professor with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Connecticut from 2013 to 2015.  

Prof. Forte’s research focuses on security-aware electronic design automation (EDA), design and applications of hardware (HW) security primitives, HW intellectual property (IP) protection, microelectronics supply chain security and assurance, applications of artificial intelligence (AI), and biometric authentication. On these topics, he has 250+ publications and 20+ patents. Some of his most notable contributions to the field include finding multiple critical cryptographic flaws in the IEEE P1735-2014 Standard for Encryption and Management of Electronic Design Intellectual Property (IP) and addressing them with the IEEE P1735 working group, developing anti-counterfeit technologies for application specific integrated circuit (ASICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and memories, creating automated IC and printed circuit board (PCB) reverse engineering flows and physical layer countermeasures,  and proposing an electrocardiogram (ECG) presentation attack and countermeasures.

Prof. Forte is a recipient of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (ECASE) by the Army Research Office (ARO), the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award, and the ARO Young Investigator Award. For teaching and advising, he has received the Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering Doctoral Dissertation Advisor/Mentoring Award, the Excellence in Teaching Award from UF’s ECE Graduate Student Organization, and the George Corcoran Outstanding Teaching Award from University of Maryland. He has also received best paper awards and/or nominations from the Electronic Device Failure Analysis Society (EDFAS) in 2021, ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODAES) in 2018, International Symposium for Testing and Failure Analysis (ISTFA) in 2018, International Joint Conference on Biometrics (IJCB) 2018, ACM Computing Reviews Notable Computing Books and Articles in 2016, IEEE International Symposium on Hardware Oriented Security and Trust (HOST) 2016 and 2015, ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC) 2012, and NASA/ESA Conference on Adaptive Hardware and Systems (AHS) 2011.

Prof. Forte is a senior member of ACM as well as a senior member of the IEEE. He serves or has served on the technical program and/or organizing committees of prestigious events such as the ACM/IEEE Design Automation Conference (DAC), ACM/IEEE International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), USENIX Security, Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium, IEEE HOST, International Test Conference (ITC), ISTFA, Biometrics: Theory, Applications and Systems  (BTAS), IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition (FG), Hardwear.io, and Workshop on Attacks and Solutions in Hardware Security (ASHES). Prof. Forte has been an Associate Editor for the ACM Journal on Emerging Technologies in Computing (JETC) since 2020, the Journal of Cryptographic Engineering (JCEN) since 2021, and the Journal of Hardware and System Security (HaSS) since 2016. He has also been a Guest Editor for special issues at these venues on multiple occasions as well as at IEEE Computer.

• Beyond the Lab: Real-Time Applications of Power and EM Side-Channel Analysis

  In recent years, power and electromagnetic (EM) side-channel analysis (SCA) has made significant strides within laboratory environments,...

• Building Resilience: The Power of Cyber-Informed Engineering in a Digital Age

  As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, the intersection of engineering and cybersecurity has emerged as a critical frontier. In...

• Counterfeit Electronics Detection and Avoidance

  Counterfeit electronic components are electronic parts that are misrepresented in terms of their authenticity, class, and/or quality. Due to...

• Hardware Obfuscation Pitfalls and Potential

  Globalization and outsourcing have created security risks to hardware intellectual property (IP), integrated circuits (ICs), and printed...

• Hardware Security and Assurance: The Power of Reverse Engineering

  Traditional cybersecurity focuses on software and networking and relies on an inherent trust of the underlying hardware. However, the argument...

• The Weakest Link: Microelectronics Security Against Physical Attacks

  For the past decade and a half, the hardware security community has expended significant time on threats related to semiconductor...