The 4th Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop

The 4th Program Protection and Reverse Engineering Workshop will be held in New Orleans, Louisiana, Tuesday, December 9, 2014, in conjunction with the Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC). ACSAC will be held at the Hyatt French Quarter, a New Orleans hotel located in the historic French Quarter. 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.