Finding programming errors earlier by evaluating runtime monitors ahead-of-time

Runtime monitoring allows programmers to validate, for instance, the proper use of application interfaces. Given a property specification, a runtime monitor tracks appropriate runtime events to detect violations and possibly execute recovery code. Although powerful, runtime monitoring inspects only one program run at a time and so may require many program runs to find errors. Therefore, in this paper, we present ahead-of-time techniques that can (1) prove the absence of property violations on all program runs, or (2) flag locations where violations are likely to occur. Our work focuses on tracematches, an expressive runtime monitoring notation for reasoning about groups of correlated objects. We describe a novel flow-sensitive static analysis for analyztor states. Our abstraction captures both positive information (a set of objects could be in a particular monitor state) and negative information (the set is known not to be in a state). The analysis resolves heap references by combinin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGSOFT
• Authors: Eric Bodden, Patrick Lam, Laurie J. Hendren
• Keywords: Runtime Monitoring Inspects, Runtime Monitoring Notation, Runtime Verification, SIGSOFT 2008, Software Engineering