========================================================== Call for Papers IEEE Software Special Issue on Software Protection
URL: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/swcfp2 =========================================================== Important Dates =============== Submission Deadline: 1 August 2010 Notification: 9 October 2010 Revisions of Accepted Papers: 30 October 2010 Final Decision: 20 November 2010 Final Versions of Accepted Papers: 2 December 2010 Publication: March 2011 What is Software Protection? ============================ Software companies have much at stake in protecting their valuable intellectual property. Software protection techniques aim at developing algorithms that defend the integrity of data and software applications, deployed on untrusted hosts, from reverse engineering, piracy, and unauthorized and malicious modifications. Adopting such techniques can mean the difference between business survival and failure. In particular, software developers face these recurring issues: * What are the current threats to intellectual property, and what are the key protection mechanisms? * How to evaluate and compare different protection tools and techniques, and how to select the one that best fits a particular company's requirements? * What are concrete examples and case studies of attacks to software products, and what lessons can be learned from failures caused by lack of attention to software protection? * How can software protection be used to prove authorship violation, and how are these mechanisms recognized by international laws? * What kinds of software protection techniques are commonly deployed by malicious software, and what approaches and tools are effective against such methods? Software protection is an area of growing importance in software engineering and security: leading-edge researchers have developed several pioneering approaches for preventing or resisting software piracy and tampering, building a heterogeneous body of knowledge spanning different topics: obfuscation, information hiding, reverse engineering, source/binary code transformation, operating systems, networking, encryption, and trusted computing. Topics ====== IEEE Software seeks submissions for a special issue on software protection. We seek articles that present proven mechanisms and strategies to mitigate one or more of the problems faced by software protection. These strategies should offer practitioners appropriate methods, approaches, techniques, guidelines, and tools to support evaluation and integration of software protection techniques into their software products. Possible topics include: * Analysis of legal, ethical, and usability aspects of software protection * Best practices and lesson learned while dealing with different relevant threats * Case studies on success and/or failure in applying software protections * Code obfuscation and reverse-engineering complexity * Computing with encrypted functions and data * Protection of authorship: watermarking and fingerprinting * Remote attestations and network-based approaches * Security evaluation of software protection's effectiveness * Software protection methods used by malware (viruses, rootkits, worms, and botnets) * Source and binary code protections * Tamper-resistant software: mobile, self-checking, and self-modifying code * Tools to implement or defeat software protections * Trusted computing or other hardware-assisted protection * Virtualization and protections based on operating systems Contributions ============= Submissions can be either regular or short articles. Regular articles must not exceed 4,700 words, including figures and tables, which count for 200 words each. Submissions in excess of these limits may be rejected without refereeing. The articles we deem within the theme and scope will be peer reviewed and are subject to editing for magazine style, clarity, organization, and space. Be sure to include the name of the special issue when you are submitting your regular paper to the IEEE Web site. Short papers are contributions (max 1,000 words) from recognized experts on the state of the art (and the open issues) of software protection from different viewpoints: * Software protection researcher * Vendor of software protection tools * Open source community * Software security through hardware * Company using software protection tools to protect their products * Government institutions Short papers must be directly submitted by email to the guest editors ([email protected]) for review, putting [IEEE Software Protection] in the email subject. All articles should have a practical orientation and be written in a style accessible to practitioners. Overly complex, purely research-oriented, or theoretical treatments are not appropriate. Articles should be novel. IEEE Software does not republish material published previously in other venues, including other periodicals and formal conference/workshop proceedings, whether previous publication was in print or in electronic form. Further Information =================== For more information about the focus, contact the Guest Editors ( [email protected] ) : * Paolo Falcarin, University of East London * Christian Collberg, University of Arizona * Mikhail Atallah, Purdue University * Mariusz Jakubowski, Microsoft Research Please check the official web-page: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/swcfp2 For general author guidelines: www.computer.org/software/author.htm For submission details: [email protected] _______________________________________________ cryptography mailing list [email protected] http://lists.randombit.net/mailman/listinfo/cryptography
