CALL FOR PAPERS
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5th Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop (PPREW-5)
Hilton Los Angeles/Universal City
Los Angeles, CA
December 08, 2015
Website: http://www.pprew.org

Co-Located with:
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC) 2015
Website: https://www.acsac.org/
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Important Dates:
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Paper Submission: September 1, 2015
Author Notification: October 19, 2015
Camera Ready: November 20, 2015
Workshop: December 8, 2015

Workshop Aims:
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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. Program protection techniques vary widely
from the use of obfuscation, tamper-proofing, watermarking,
virtualization, and an array of methods to frustrate disassembly,
debugging, and decompilation. 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.

PPREW invites papers on program protection and reverse engineering
used in legitimate contexts, with particular focus on studies and
experiments that explore the boundary of practical methods and
their theoretical limits. The workshop is intended to 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. 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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For accepted papers, at least one author must register for, attend,
and make a presentation at PPREW in order for the paper to appear
in the workshop proceedings. Proceedings will be published through
ACM International Conference Publication Series (ICPS) and will
appear in the ACM Digital Library.

Program Chairs:
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•Mila Dalla Preda, University of Verona, Italy
•Natalia Stakhanova, University of New Brunswick, Canada

General Chair:
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•J. Todd McDonald, University of South Alabama, USA

Program Committee:
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•Todd Andel, University of South Alabama, USA
•Guillaume Bonfante, Loria, France
•Lorenzo Cavallaro, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
•Mihai Christodorescu, Qualcomm-IBM Research, USA
•Jack Davidson, University of Virginia, USA
•Bjorn De Sutter, University of Ghent, Belgium
•Saumya Debray, University of Arizona, USA
•Jose M. Fernandez, Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal, Canada
•Yuan Xiang Gu, IRDETO, Canada
•Sylvain Guilley, TELECOM-ParisTech and Secure-IC S.A.S., France
•Thorsten Holz, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany
•Johannes Kinder, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK
•Andy King, University of Kent, UK
•Sergio Maffeis, Imperial College London, UK
•Frederico Maggi, Politecnico di Milano, Italy
•William Mahoney, University of Nebraska Omaha, USA
•Jean-Yves Marion, INPL, France
•Isabella Mastroeni, Universita' di Verona, Italy
•Mizuhito Ogawa, JIST, Japan
•Mathias Payer, Purdue University, USA
•Stacy Prowell, Oak Ridge National Lab, USA
•William Robinson, Vanderbilt University, USA
•Axel Simon, Technische Universität München, Germany
•Clark Thomborson, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Steering Committee:
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•Arun Lakhotia, University of Louisiana-Lafayette, USA
•Roberto Giacobazzi, University of Verona, Italy
•J. Todd McDonald, University of South Alabama, USA
•Mila Dalla Preda, University of Verona, Italy