Computational forensic engineering (CFE) aims to identify the entity that created a particular intellectual property (IP). Rather than relying on watermarking content or designs, the generic CFE methodology analyzes the statistics of certain features of a given IP and quantizes the likelihood that a well known source has created it. In this paper, we describe the generic methodology of CFE and present a set of techniques that, given a pool of compilation tools, identify the one used to generate a particular hardware/software design. The generic CFE approach has four phases: feature and statistics data collection, feature extraction, entity clustering, and validation. In addition to IP protection, the developed CFE paradigm can have other potential applications: optimization algorithm selection and tuning, benchmark selection, and source-verification for mobile code.