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Our Principal
& Founder

Sawtooth Digital Forensics is led by Dr. Michael A. Haney, a cybersecurity researcher, educator, and practitioner with thirty years of experience across industry, academia, government agencies, and national-laboratory research.  

 

Based in East Idaho, serving the Sawtooths, the Snake River Plain, the Panhandle, and the Intermountain West.

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Enterprise cybersecurity consulting. Two decades at global consulting firms leading cybersecurity advisory teams delivering multi-million-dollar security program portfolios to Fortune-500 industrial, technology, financial-services, and federal-agency clients. At peak, tracked $26 million in concurrent client engagements across an active portfolio. That period grounds the program-management discipline Sawtooth's Advisory Services engagements are built on today — the same framework literacy, program structuring, evidence packaging, and grant-writing rigor that Fortune-500 security programs run on, scaled down to what a municipal water utility, a rural nonprofit, or a small-business owner can actually carry

Doctoral research and academic career. PhD in Computer Science from the University of Tulsa (2015); dissertation on privacy-preserving methods in network security monitoring. Faculty positions at the University of Idaho (tenured 2021), the University of Tulsa, and Idaho State University. Previously held a joint appointment with Idaho National Laboratory's Cybercore Integration Center — one of the nation's premier energy- and infrastructure-security research environments. Founded and directed the Idaho Cyber Range and served as Program Manager for the Idaho Cybersecurity Education Initiative, coordinating cybersecurity curriculum and workforce development across eight institutions of higher education statewide.

Digital-forensics practice. GCFA-certified examiner since 2012. Former Quality Manager for a private ANAB (ASCLD/LAB) accredited digital forensics laboratory — responsible for the quality-management system, documentation, corrective-action process, and internal audit function under the accredited standard. Former instructor at the U.S. Secret Service National Computer Forensics Institute (NCFI) and the U.K. Royal Military Police, training investigators in digital forensic technique.

Research record. 60+ peer-reviewed publications; a U.S. patent in distributed privacy-preserving security monitoring (Patent 10,326,803); over $16 million in externally funded research from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, NIST, the National Security Agency, and Idaho National Laboratory. Best Paper recognition from the ACM Cyber and Information Security Research Conference (2014) and the American Nuclear Society (2019).

AI teaching and advising. Most recently developed and delivered two courses — Fundamentals of Applied and Industrial AI and Secure and Trustworthy AI Systems — supporting AI programs at both the University of Tulsa and Idaho State University; served on AI task forces at both institutions. This teaching feeds directly into the AI-risk and secure-integration work Sawtooth takes on for municipalities, nonprofits, and small businesses navigating what AI means for their operations.

Digital Forensics Laboratory Standards Experience. Sawtooth Digital Forensics does not itself hold ISO/IEC 17025 accreditation or ASCLD/LAB (now ANAB) accreditation. These are laboratory-scale accreditations that are not held by any solo-principal digital-forensics practice and are not required for individual expert-witness qualification. What Dr. Haney brings to Sawtooth engagements is direct working experience with these standards: Former Quality Manager, private ANAB (ASCLD/LAB) accredited digital forensics laboratory. Responsible for the QMS, documentation, corrective-action process, and internal audit function under the accredited standard — the operational side of what an accredited lab actually maintains, day to day, to keep its accreditation. ISO/IEC 17025 experience. Familiarity with the standard's application to digital-evidence testing, competence evaluation of examiners, and the documentation depth external assessors expect. Case-by-case posture. Sawtooth's forensic engagements are worked to the substantive requirements of these standards — documented chain of custody, write-blocked imaging, cryptographic hash verification, examiner competence documentation, defensible methodology — as a matter of practice, not because the lab itself is accredited.

Dr. Michael A. Haney headshot

Credentials

Post-Secondary Education

  • PhD — Computer Science — University of Tulsa — 2015

  • MS — Computer Science — University of Tulsa — 2013

  • BS — Mathematics — University of Kentucky — 1998

Certifications and Licensure

  • CISSP — Certified Information Systems Security Professional (since 2002)

  • GCFA — GIAC Certified Forensic Analyst

  • GCIH — GIAC Certified Incident Handler

  • GCIA — GIAC Certified Intrusion Analyst

  • GSEC — GIAC Security Essentials Certification

  • CFR-310 — CertNexus — Cybersecurity First Responder 

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