Stateful breakpoints: a practical approach to defining parameterized runtime monitors

Abstract

A runtime monitor checks a safety property during a program's execution. A parameterized runtime monitor can monitor properties containing free variables, or parameters. For instance, a monitor for the regular expression "close(s)+ read(s)" will warn the user when reading from a stream s that has previously been closed. Parameterized runtime monitors are very expressive, and research on this topic has lately gained much traction in the Runtime Verification community. Existing monitoring algorithms are very efficient. Nevertheless, existing tools provide little support for actually defining runtime monitors, probably one reason for why few practitioners are using runtime monitoring so far.