Upcoming issues:
ERCIM News 140, January 2025; special theme: Large Scale Data Analytics
ERCIM News No. 139 (October 2024)
DEADLINE FOR CONTRIBUTIONS: Tuesday 3 September 2024
Please read the guidelines below before submitting an article.
A Word template for ERCIM News articles is available for download.
The sections of ERCIM News 138 are :
- Joint ERCIM Actions
- Special Theme: Software Security
- Research and Innovation
- Events
- In Brief
The Special Theme and the Research and Innovation sections contain articles presenting a panorama of European research activities. The Special Theme focuses on a sector that has been selected by the editors from a short list of currently "hot" topics whereas the Research and Innovation section contains articles describing scientific activities, research results, and technical transfer endeavours in any sector of Information and Communication Science and Technology (ICST), telecommunications or applied mathematics. Submissions to the Special Theme section are subjected to an external review process coordinated by invited guest editors whereas submissions to the Research and Innovation section are checked and approved by the ERCIM News editorial board.
Special Theme: Software Security
Guest editors:
- Sebastian Schrittwieser, University of Vienna, Austria
- Michele Ianni, University of Calabria, Italy
In today's world, software is everywhere, deeply integrated into various aspects of our lives, including critical industries. From this widespread use of software, the need for effective security measures, particularly in scenarios where software is directly exposed to potential attackers, emerges. In a so-called Man-At-The-End (MATE) attack scenario, an attacker has physical access to a device and, therefore, complete control over the software it runs. Maintaining the integrity of software – i.e., ensuring it works as intended without unauthorized changes – and protecting the confidentiality of assets it contains is thus an essential foundation for trustworthy IT systems. Over the past 30 years, many software protection techniques have been introduced, all aimed at making MATE attacks more difficult. These are classified as code obfuscation (protection against the analysis), software tamper-proofing (protection against modification), and watermarking and fingerprinting (to mark instances of the software). Protections might also be assisted by hardware (e.g., physically unclonable functions).
In the context of malicious software (malware), the sides of code writers and analysts are flipped. Malware analysis deals with the challenges of timely analyzing hundreds of thousands of malware samples each day and thus has to resort to executing a few lightweight, limited analysis and de-obfuscation techniques.
Contributions to this special topic should present innovative research, case studies, or practical applications both in the areas of protecting software in a MATE attack context as well as the detection and analysis of protected malware. We look forward to insightful submissions that advance these fields and provide valuable knowledge to both the academic community as well as industry.
Topics include, but are not limited to::
- Software Attacks and Defenses
- Program Analysis
- Reverse Engineering
- Malware Analysis
- Software Obfuscation and De-obfuscation
- Software Watermarking and Fingerprinting
- Software Tampering and Anti-Tampering
- Software Piracy Detection and Prevention
- Software Steganography
- Software Similarity Analysis
- Authorship Attribution and Plagiarism Detection
- Side Channel Attacks
- (Remote) Software Attestation
- Anti-Debugging and Anti-Simulation
- IoT Software Attack and Defenses
- Hardware-based Software Protection
- Trusted Execution Environments, Trusted Platform Modules and Secure Elements
- Digital Rights Management
- Cloud Software Protection.
All articles have to be sent to the local editor for your country (see About ERCIM News) or to the central editor
Reviewing:
Articles submitted to the special theme and the research and society sections are subject to a review process.
Guidelines for ERCIM News articles
Style: ERCIM News is read by a large variety of people. Keeping this in mind the article should be descriptive (emphasize more the 'what' than the 'how') without too much technical detail together with an illustration, if possible.
Contributions in ERCIM News are normally presented without formulas. One can get a long way with careful phrasing, although it is not always wise to avoid formulas altogether. In cases where authors feel that the use of formulas is necessary to clarify matters, this should be done in a separate box (to be treated as an illustration). However, formulas and symbols scattered through the text must be avoided as much as possible.
Length: Keep the article short, i.e. 800 +/- 100 words.
Format: Submissions preferably in ASCII text or MS Word. Pictures/Illustrations must be submitted as separate files (not embedded in a MS Word file) in a resolution/quality suitable for printing.
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The emphasis in ERCIM News is on 'NEWS'. This should be reflected in both title and lead ('teaser').
Also: NO REVIEW ARTICLES!
- Title
- Author (full name, max. two or three authors)
- Teaser:
a few words about the project/topic. Printed in boldface, this part is intended to raise interest (keep it short). - Details describing:
what the project/product is
which institutions are involved
where it takes place
why the research is being done
when it was started/completed the aim of the project
the techniques employed
the orientation of the project
future activities
other institutes involved in this project
co-operation with other ERCIM members in this field - References:
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- The references should be as concise as possible and restricted to the minimal information needed. Avoid all unnecessary words (pages x pp., year, editors, location,...). Use acronyms instead of full conference names - OOPSLA x Object-Oriented Programming Systems, abbreviations (e.g. Conf. x Conference, IEEE TPAMI x IEEE Transaction on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, etc.).
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A Word template for ERCIM News articles is available for download.
Publishing in ERCIM News offers several advantages:
- ERCIM News represents an excellent opportunity to present your research to a broad audience, also outside your own research community
- ERCIM News is published in print and online and reaches about 10,000 readers
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- ERCIM offers a free professional proof-reading service
- Authors can reuse their articles; the copyright of the articles remains with the authors.
- Articles of the sections "Special Theme" and "Research and Innovation" are referenced by DBLP and by Web of Science (from issue 104 onwards)