Efficient Formalism-Independent Monitoring of Parametric Properties

Parametric properties provide an effective and natural means to describe object-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 testing and security, imposes a highly non-trivial challenge on monitoring approaches due to the potentially huge number of parameter instances. Existing solutions usually compromise their expressiveness 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 static knowledge about the desired property to optimize monitoring. The needed knowledge is not specific to the underlying formalism and can be easily computed when generating 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.