CALL FOR PAPERS

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6th Software Security, Protection, and Reverse Engineering Workshop (SSPREW)

Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City, Los Angeles, CA

December 5-6, 2016

Collocated with ACSAC 2016

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Venue: https://www.acsac.org/ 

Workshop: http://www.ssprew.org/ 

 

The 6th Software Security, Protection, and Reverse Engineering Workshop is
now a consolidated workshop that merges into one venue the Program
Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop (PPREW) and the Software
Security and Protection Workshop (SSP), which both started in 2011.
Software security is a discipline that lies at the crossroads of security,
cryptography, networks, software engineering, computer architecture,
operating systems, and compiler design. Program protection and reverse
engineering techniques both find their practical use in malware research and
analysis as well as legitimate protection schemes for intellectual property
and commercial software.   The joint workshop will focus on how to protect
software from tampering, reverse engineering, and piracy. Strongly
encouraged are proposals of new, speculative ideas; evaluations of new or
known techniques in practical settings; and discussions of emerging threats
and problems in metrics, tools, and procedures for evaluating
tamperproofing, watermarking, obfuscation, birthmarking, and protection
algorithms in general. Likewise, reverse engineering of low-level constructs
such as machine code or gate-level circuit definitions through static and
dynamic analysis is geared to recover higher levels of abstract information
to determine a program's function as well as to classify it with existing
similar code (which is typically malicious).  Both program protection and
reverse engineering techniques are utilized for legitimate and illegal
purposes.  Theoretically, protection is seen as impossible in the general
case but the promise of mathematically based transformations with rigorous
cryptographic properties is an area of active interest.  Given enough time
and resources, reverse engineering and de-obfuscation is assumed to be
achievable. 

 

Important Deadlines:

.  Submission: Aug. 28, 2016 

.  Notification of Acceptance: Oct. 3, 2016

.  Camera-ready: Nov. 12, 2016

.  Workshop: Dec. 5-6, 2016

 

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following.

.  Security modelling

.  Protection metrics and measurements

.  Obfuscation / Deobfuscation

.  Tamper-proofing

.  Watermarking / Digital fingerprinting

.  Reverse engineering tools and techniques

.  Program / circuit slicing

.  Information hiding and discovery

.  Hardware-based protections

.  Source code analysis / program understanding

.  Forensic analysis and protections

.  Virtualization for protection and/or analysis

.  New cutting-edge protection technologies

.  Diversity metrics and measurements

.  Man-at-the-end (MATE) attack technologies

.  MATE characterization

.  Theoretic Analysis Frameworks:

    -- Abstract Interpretation

    -- Term Rewriting Systems

    -- Machine Learning

    -- Large Scale Boolean Matching

    -- Homomorphic Encryption

.  User interface design for controlling protection

.  Static/dynamic analysis techniques

.  Moving target and active cyber defense

.  Protection profiling, verification, and evaluation

 

SSPREW will provide a discussion forum for researchers that are exploring
theoretical definitions and frameworks, implementing and using practical
methods and empirical studies, and those developing new tools or techniques
in this unique area of security. The workshop has historically provided
exchange of ideas and support for cooperative relationships among
researchers in industry, academia, and government.

Submission Guidelines:  Original, unpublished manuscripts of up to 12-pages
including figures and references must follow the ACM SIG proceedings format.
Papers will be published through ACM International Conference Proceedings
Series (ICPS) and available in the ACM Digital Library.

 

Submission is through EasyChair:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ssprew6  

See workshop website (http://www.ssprew.org) for more details.

 

Program Co-Chairs:

Mila Dalla Preda, Univ of Verona, Italy

Natalia Stakhanova, Univ of New Brunswick, Canada

 

General Workshop Chair:

J. Todd McDonald, Univ of South Alabama, USA