Scope of the Workshop

Software Protection techniques aim to defend the confidentiality and integrity of software applications that are exposed to an adversary that shares the execution host and access privileges of the application. This is often denoted as protection against MATE (Man-At-The-End) attacks. This is an area of growing importance. For industry, in many cases the deployment of such techniques is crucial for the survival of their business.

The aim of SPRO workshop is to bring together researchers and industrial practitioners both from software protection and the wider software engineering community to discuss software protection techniques, evaluation methodologies, and practical aspects such as tooling. The objective is to stimulate the community working in this growing area of security, and to increase the synergies between the research areas of software protection engineering and their practical deployment.

Questions that we aim to address include

• What protection techniques can be designed to protect given assets in software applications?
• Which threats need to be considered, and how can we evaluate the robustness of protected applications with respect thereto?
• How can different protection techniques be efficiently combined and what do we gain?
• What can we learn from existing use cases?
• How can protection techniques be efficiently tooled and integrated into a build process?

These are only a few of the many questions that practitioners face recurrently.

Desired articles should aim to address these questions. We seek articles that present new software protection techniques and novel insights into the evaluation thereof; and articles that aim to discuss industrial aspects.