Flexible and Extensible Runtime Verification for Java

Runtime verification validates the correctness of a program's execution trace. Much work has been done on improving the expressiveness and efficiency of runtime verifi- cation. However, current approaches require static deployment of the verification logic and are often restricted to a limited set of events that can be captured and analyzed, hindering the adoption of runtime verification in production systems. A popular system for runtime verification in Java, JavaMOP (Monitor- Oriented Programming in Java), suffers from the aforementioned limitations due to its dependence on AspectJ, which supports neither dynamic weaving nor an extensible join-point model. In this paper, we extend the JavaMOP framework with a dynamic deployment API and a new MOP specification translator, which targets the domain-specific aspect language DiSL instead of AspectJ; DiSL offers an open join-point model that allows for extensions. A case study on lambda expressions in Java8 demon- strates the extensibility of our approach. Moreover, in comparison with JavaMOP using load-time weaving, our implementation reduces runtime overhead by 21%, and heap memory usage by 16%, on average. Keywords—Runtime verification; Monitor-Oriented Program- ming (MOP); dynamic program analysis; dynamic deployment