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: December 09, 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> 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, Politecnico di Milano, 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, New Zealand 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, Purdue University, 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