CALL FOR PAPERS
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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/
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Important Dates:
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Paper Submission: October 10, 2014
Author Notification: November 10, 2014
Camera Ready: November 28, 2014
Workshop: December 09, 2014

Workshop Aims:
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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:
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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:
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Arrangements for publication of accepted and presented papers at PPREW are
currently underway.

Program Chairs:
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.Mila Dalla Preda, University of Verona, Italy
.J. Todd McDonald, University of South Alabama, USA

Proceedings Chair:
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.Natalia Stakhanova, University of New Brunswick, Canada

Program Committee:
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.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:
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.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