Efficient Formalism-Independent Monitoring of Parametric Properties

• Authors: Feng Chen;Patrick O'Neil Meredith;Dongyun Jin;Grigore Rosu
• Venue: ASE '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering
• Year: 2009

Parametric properties provide an effective and natural means to describeobject-oriented system behaviors, where the parameters are typed by classes and bound to object instances at runtime. Efficient monitoring of parametric properties, in spite of increasingly growing interest due to applications such as testingand security, imposes a highly non-trivial challenge on monitoring approaches due to the potentially huge number of parameter instances.Existing solutions usually compromise theirexpressiveness for performance or vice versa. In this paper, we propose a generic, in terms of specification formalism, yet efficient, solution to monitoring parametric specifications. Our approach is based on a general algorithm for slicing parametric traces and makes use of {\em static}knowledge about the desired property to optimize monitoring.The needed knowledgeis not specific to the underlying formalism and can be easily computed whengenerating monitoring code from the property.Our approach works with any specification formalism, providing better and extensible expressiveness. Also, a thorough evaluation shows that our technique outperforms other state-of-art techniques optimized for particular logics or properties.