Alec Yasinsac

Alec Yasinsac is a computer scientist and voting system security expert with extensive and broad experience in the information security field.

He served as Professor and Dean of the School of Computing at the University of South Alabama until October 2023. He joined the School of Computing in July 2008 after spending nine years on the faculty at Florida State University which followed a twenty-year career in the United States Marines as a Data Systems and Communications Officer. He is also Co-founder of SAIT Laboratory and has operational experience in software development, information systems management, network engineering, and information security, having spent active duty tours in Japan, Korea, North Carolina, California, and Virginia.

Alec received his doctoral degree in Computer Science from the University of Virginia, where his thesis advisor and mentor was Bill Wulf. His major research interests are network and wireless security, electronic voting security, secure software, cryptography, intrusion detection, computing forensics, and security protocols. He has published over seventy refereed conference, symposium, and journal papers. He has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Department of Defense, the Army Research Office, the Florida Department of State, and several industrial partners. He has directed two doctoral theses, fifteen master's theses, and three undergraduate student theses. He has taught nearly a hundred college courses in mathematics, computer science, and information security.

Born and raised in the mountains of North Carolina, Alec attended Appalachian State University for his undergraduate education, where he received his Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. He then earned a Master’s of Science degree in Computer Science from the Naval Postgraduate School while on active duty in the Marines.

Security protocol verification is the foundation of Alec's research interests. He has published papers on formal methods, cryptographic authentication, group encryption, secure routing protocols, wireless security, intrusion detection, digital forensics, and on a variety of computing education topics. He is regularly a member of several Program Committees including the ACM's premier security conference, the ACM Conference on Computer and Communication Security, The International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, The International Conference on Information Systems Security, the IEEE Information Assurance Workshop, the International Conference on Information and Communications Security, and the International Performance Computing and Communications Conference. He was General Chair for the 2013 Colloquium on Information Systems Security Education and was the program committee chair for the Systematic Approach to Digital Forensic Engineering Workshop 2008.

Alec is a senior member of IEEE and of ACM. He is a member of the U.S. Public Policy Committee of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. With research interests in electronic voting systems, Alec sat on the State of Florida's Help America Vote Act Planning Committee. He served on the Advisory Board for the 2007 National Academy of Engineering National Meeting Symposium on Electronic Voting. He led the first academic source code review in support of an election audit for the State of Florida's United States Congressional District 13 race. He also conducted several other electronic voting security code reviews and systems security analysis for the Florida Department of State in support of state voting systems' certification processes. He routinely contributes to national meetings and panels that address voting system security issues.

Contact Alec at yasinsac@gmail.com.