Dynamic event-based runtime monitoring of real-time and contextual properties

Abstract

Given the intractability of exhaustively verifying software, the use of runtime-verification, to verify single execution paths at runtime, is becoming popular. Although the use of runtime verification is increasing in industrial settings, various challenges still are to be faced to enable it to spread further. We present dynamic communicating automata with timers and events to describe properties of systems, implemented in Larva, an event-based runtime verification tool for monitoring temporal and contextual properties of Java programs. The combination of timers with dynamic automata enables the straightforward expression of various properties, including replication of properties, as illustrated in the use of Larva for the runtime monitoring of a real life case study — an online transaction system for credit card. The features of Larva are also benchmarked and compared to a number of other runtime verification tools, to assess their respective strengths in property expressivity and overheads induced through monitoring.