[ecoop-info] CFP: IEEE Software - Special Issue on Software Protection

[Paolo Falcarin]

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Call for Papers
IEEE Software
Special Issue on Software Protection

URL: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/computingnow/swcfp2
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Important Dates
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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 
(sw2_2010 at computer.org) 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 ( 
sw2_2010 at computer.org):

* 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: software at computer.org