Efficient monitoring of parametric context-free patterns

Recent developments in runtime verification and monitoring show that parametric regular and temporal logic specifications can be efficiently monitored against large programs. However, these logics reduce to ordinary finite automata, limiting their expressivity. For example, neither can specify structured properties that refer to the call stack of the program. While contextfree grammars (CFGs) are expressive and well-understood, existing techniques for monitoring CFGs generate large runtime overhead in real-life applications. This paper shows, for the first time, that monitoring parametric CFGs is practical (with overhead on the order of 10% or lower for average cases, several times faster than the state-of-the-art). We present a monitor synthesis algorithm for CFGs based on an LR(1) parsing algorithm, modified with stack cloning to account for good prefix matching. In addition, a logicindependent mechanism is introduced to support matching against the suffixes of execution traces.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ASE
• Authors: Patrick O'Neil Meredith, Dongyun Jin, Feng Chen, Grigore Rosu
• Keywords: ASE 2010, Ordinary Finite Automata, Runtime Verification, Temporal Logic Specifications