Predictive runtime enforcement

Runtime enforcement (RE) is a technique to ensure that the (untrustworthy) output of a black-box system satisfies some desired properties. In RE, the output of the running system, modeled as a sequence of events, is fed into an enforcer. The enforcer ensures that the sequence complies with a certain property, by delaying or modifying events if necessary. This paper deals with predictive runtime enforcement, where the system is not entirely black-box, but we know something about its behavior. This a priori knowledge about the system allows to output some events immediately, instead of delaying them until more events are observed, or even blocking them permanently. This in turn results in better enforcement policies. We also show that if we have no knowledge about the system, then the proposed enforcement mechanism reduces to standard (non-predictive) runtime enforcement. All our results related to predictive RE of untimed properties are also formalized and proved in the Isabelle theorem prover. We also discuss how our predictive runtime enforcement framework can be extended to enforce timed properties.