PPREW 2014 - 4th Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop (PPREW-4)

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 and 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 is a forum for researchers and practitioners in academia, industry, and government who focus on analysis, security, and protection in software and hardware systems. 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.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Obfuscation / deobfuscation
Tamper-proofing
Hardware-based protection
Side channel analysis vulnerabilities
Theoretical analysis frameworks:
Abstract Interpretation
Homomorphic Encryption
Term Rewriting Systems
Machine Learning
Large Scale Boolean Matching
Software watermarking
Digital fingerprinting
Reverse engineering tools / techniques
Program / circuit slicing
Component / functional Identification
Source code (static/dynamic) analysis
Information hiding and discovery
Virtualization for protection and/or analysis
Forensic and anti-forensic protection
Moving target and active cyber defense