Apologies for cross-posting

---------------------------

 

 

CALL FOR PAPERS

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

4th Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop (PPREW-4)

Hyatt French Quarter  

New Orleans, LA  

December 09, 2014

Website: http://www.pprew.org  

 

Co-Located with:

Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2014

Website: https://www.acsac.org/

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Important Dates:  

***********************    

Paper Submission: October 10, 2014    

Author Notification: November 10, 2014          

Camera Ready: November 28, 2014  

Workshop: 09 December, 2014  

     

Workshop Aims:    

***************  

Program protection and reverse engineering are dualisms of good and evil.  

Beneficial uses of reverse engineering abound: malicious software needs to be  

analyzed and understood in order to prevent their spread and to assess their

functional footprint; owners of intellectual property (IP) at times need to

recover lost or unmaintained designs. Conversely, malicious reverse engineering

allows illegal copying and subversion;  designers can employ obfuscation and

tamper-proofing on IP to target various attack vectors. In this sense,

protecting IP and protecting malware from detection and analysis is a

double-edged sword: depending on the context, the same techniques are either

beneficial or harmful. Likewise, tools that deobfuscate malware in good contexts

become analysis methods that support reverse engineering for illegal activity.

PPREW invites papers on practical and theoretical approaches for    

program protection and reverse engineering used in beneficial contexts,    

focusing on analysis/ deobfuscation of malicious code and methods/tools  

that hinder reverse engineering. Ongoing work with preliminary results,  

theoretical approaches, tool-based methods, and empirical studies on various

methods are all appropriate. Studies on hardware/circuit based methods or

software/assembly based mechanisms are within scope of the workshop. We expect

the workshop to provide exchange of ideas and support for cooperative

relationships among researchers in industry, academia, and government.  

     

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

- Obfuscation / Deobfuscation (polymorphism)

- Tamper-proofing / Hardware-based protection  

- Theoretic proofs for exploitation or protection  

- Software watermarking / Digital fingerprinting  

- Reverse engineering tools and techniques

- Side channel analysis and vulnerability mitigation  

- Program / circuit slicing  

- Information hiding and discovery  

- Virtualization for protection and/or analysis

- Forensic and anti-forensic protection

- Moving target and active cyber defense

- Theoretic analysis frameworks:

o Abstract Interpretation  

 o Homomorphic Encryption

o Term Rewriting Systems  

 o Machine Learning  

 o Large Scale Boolean Matching

- Component / Functional Identification

- Program understanding

- Source code (static/dynamic) analysis techniques  

 

Submission Guidelines:

***********************

Original, unpublished manuscripts of up to 12-pages including figures and

references must follow the ACM SIG proceedings format. SIGPLAN conference

paper templates are available for LaTeX and Word at:

http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates.

Submissions must be in PDF.

 

Submitted papers must adhere to the SIGPLAN Re-publication Policy and the

ACM Policy on Plagiarism. Concurrent submissions to other conferences,

workshops, journals, or similar forums of publication are not allowed.

Submissions that do not meet these guidelines may not be considered.

 

The URL for submission is through Easy Chair:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=pprew4

 

Publication:  

********************  

Arrangements for publication of accepted and presented papers at PPREW are  

currently underway.  

 

Program Chairs:

********************

•Mila Dalla Preda, University of Verona, Italy

•J. Todd McDonald, University of South Alabama, USA

  

Proceedings Chair:  

********************  

•Natalia Stakhanova, University of New Brunswick, Canada

 

Program Committee:  

********************    

•Saumya Debray, University of Arizona, USA  

•Stephen Magill, Galois, USA  

•Frederico Maggi, University of Milan, Italy  

•Andy King, University of Kent, UK  

•Natalia Stakhanova, University of New Brunswick, Canada  

•Guillaume Bonfante, Loria, France  

•Todd Andel, University of South Alabama, USA  

•Yuan Xiang Gu, IRDETO, Canada  

•Clark Thomborson, University of Auckland  

•Johannes Kinder, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK  

•Michael Grimaila, Air Force Institute of Technology, USA  

•William Mahoney, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA  

•Mathias Payer, University of California-Berkeley, USA

•Bjorn De Sutter, Unviversity of Ghent, Belgium  

•Mihai Christodorescu, Qualcomm Reseach-IBM Research, USA  

•Sergio Maffeis, Imperial College London, UK

•Jean-Yves Marion, INPL, France  

   

Steering Committee:

********************    

•Arun Lakhotia, University of Louisiana-Lafayette, USA  

•Roberto Giocabazzi, University of Verona, Italy  

•J. Todd McDonald, University of South Alabama, USA  

•Mila Dalla Preda, University of Verona, Italy