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Specifying Properties over Inter-procedural, Source Code Level Behaviour of Programs

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Runtime Verification (RV 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12974))

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Abstract

The problem of verifying a program at runtime with respect to some formal specification has led to the development of a rich collection of specification languages. These languages often have a high level of abstraction and provide sophisticated modal operators, giving a high level of expressiveness. In particular, this makes it possible to express properties concerning the source code level behaviour of programs. However, for many languages, the correspondence between events generated at the source code level and parts of the specification in question would have to be carefully defined.

To enable expressing—using a temporal logic—properties over source code level behaviour without the need for this correspondence, previous work introduced Control-Flow Temporal Logic (CFTL), a specification language with a low level of abstraction with respect to the source code of programs. However, this work focused solely on the intra-procedural setting. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing Inter-procedural CFTL, a language for expressing source code level, inter-procedural properties of program runs. We evaluate the new language, iCFTL, via application to a real-world case study.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In the rest of the paper, we use the terms function and procedure interchangeably to denote a general, callable subroutine.

  2. 2.

    This assumption is reasonable since either 1) everything will happen on the same machine, so the machine’s clock can be used for synchronisation; or 2) if this is not the case, then protocols such as NTP can be used.

  3. 3.

    Of course, if the specification expresses a tautology or is unsatisfiable, this evaluation-by-composition approach is problematic. However, as seen in [13], satisfiability for CFTL (and therefore iCFTL) can only be decided once a sufficiently long trace has been observed, hence we do not consider it in the semantics.

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Acknowledgments

The research described has been carried out as part of the COSMOS, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement No. 957254. The authors wish to thank Lionel Briand for his feedback on iCFTL, and the CMS Experiment at CERN for help with the case study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg, Luxembourg

    Joshua Heneage Dawes & Domenico Bianculli

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  1. Joshua Heneage Dawes
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  2. Domenico Bianculli
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Correspondence to Joshua Heneage Dawes .

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  1. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Lu Feng

  2. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be'er Sheva, Israel

    Dana Fisman

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Dawes, J.H., Bianculli, D. (2021). Specifying Properties over Inter-procedural, Source Code Level Behaviour of Programs. In: Feng, L., Fisman, D. (eds) Runtime Verification. RV 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12974. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88494-9_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88494-9_2

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