StaRVOOrS - episode II : strengthen and distribute the force

Abstract

Static and runtime techniques for the verification of programs are complementary. They both have their advantages and disadvantages, and a natural question is whether they may be combined in such a way as to get the advantages of both without inheriting too much from their disadvantages. In a previous contribution to ISoLA’12, we have proposed StaRVOOrS (‘Static and Runtime Verification of Object-Oriented Software’), a unified framework for combining static and runtime verification in order to check data- and control-oriented properties. Returning to ISoLA here, we briefly report on advances since then: a unified specification language for data- and control-oriented properties, a tool for combined static and runtime verification, and experiments. On that basis, we discuss two future research directions to strengthen the power, and broaden the scope, of combined static and runtime verification: (i) to use static analysis techniques to further optimise the runtime monitor, and (ii) to extend the framework to the distributed case.