PPREW 2015 - 5th Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop

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:
Obfuscation / deobfuscation (polymorphism)
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