Call for Talks
Background
Typical software engineering methodologies are largely focused on programmer productivity and their methods have been known to introduce significant execution inefficiency as a side effect. Recent work investigating efficient and timely software has attempted to enhance software execution efficiency while preserving the source code-level abstractions and object-orientation that enhance a programmer’s productivity.
Such efforts seek to undo the side effects on security and performance overhead by reclaiming software execution efficiency and reducing indirection, as well as performing automatic program de-layering and program specialization (de-bloating). Several promising results from these efforts have demonstrated their viability in improving program execution efficiency as well as reduction of the cyber security attack surface. As a result, the community may benefit by investing in the development of tool ecosystems to take advantage of this recent progress, to mature the technologies, and determine how best to transparently deploy them.
Scope
Despite some early progress within the computer science research community, software executable transformation is not a solved science. Namely, a critical step in the process of reverse engineering and binary understanding is, in the general case, undecidable. Various automated tools (an ecosystem of tools) will need to be investigated and developed by the community to guarantee the effectiveness and correctness of transformation efforts and to enhance and ensure the security of transformed software.
The FEAST workshop will include discussion topics geared toward:
Understanding issues of software executable transformation for various programming languages and environment, and the potential methods for alleviating those issues
Identification of tools to be investigated and developed for guaranteeing correctness, enhancing security, and enabling non-critical/undesired feature removal
Identification of layers and areas of computing systems that are suitable for and can benefit from software customization/transformation, along with identification of associated challenges and constraints, and the particular adaptation to the methodology needed to operate within the identified areas
Automated extraction of models from software executables that are amenable to formal methods analysis and verification
Submission Instructions
First, a disclaimer: The FEAST workshop will be more informal than the other workshops co-located with CCS. Particularly, no papers from this workshop will be stored in the ACM Digital Library or in any other ACM collections. Papers accepted under this call (hereafter referred to as "talk proposals") and the resulting slides may be posted on this website pending permission of the author.
We invite proposals to give a talk at the workshop related to one of the topics in the above scope. The submitted talk proposals do not have to be as formal as a typical paper and no specific format is required. The proposal should adequately describe the points to be made in the talk such that the PC can make a determination on acceptance.
**UPDATE (5 SEP)** The program has been updated with four desired topic sessions. Talk proposals are being accepted under any topic with the goal of spurring discussion of that topic. Talks that further discussion could include: presentation of early research results, position talks, outlining of challenges/opportunities, or technical surveys of ongoing approaches.
Submissions must adhere to the following points:
Submissions should be at most 6 pages excluding the bibliography
Submissions must be in PDF form
Submissions must be made through EasyChair using the following link:
Deadline
The deadline for submissions is 19 September 2016. The submission site closes at 0700 GMT on 20 September 2016 (midnight PDT).