There are many reasons to protect software: your banking app needs to be protected to prevent fraud; software operating on critical infrastructures needs to be protected against vulnerability discovery; software vendors and service companies need it to protect their business; etc. In the past decade, many techniques to protect software have been presented and broken. Beyond making individual techniques better, the challenge includes to be able to deploy them in practice and be able to evaluate them. This is the objective of SPRO, the first International Workshop on Software Protection: to bring together researchers and industrial practitioners both from software protection and the wider software engineering community to share experience and provide directions for future research, in order to stimulate the use of software engineering techniques in novel aspects of software protection.
This first edition of the workshop is held at ICSE 2015 in Florence (Italy) with the aim of creating a community working in this new growing area of security, and to highlight its synergies with different research fields of software engineering, like: formal models, program analysis, reverse engineering, code transformations, empirical evaluation, and software metrics. This paper presents the research themes and challenges of the workshop, describes the workshop organization, and summarizes the research papers.