Program Monitoring

Course material for part II of CS 119 - Reliable Software: Testing and Monitoring

Teacher

Teaching Assistant

Part I

Acknowledgements

Overview

This course offers an introduction to the theory and practice of program monitoring, or runtime verification as we shall call it. Runtime verification is the study of how to design artifacts for monitoring and analyzing program executions. Such artifacts can be used for a variety of purposes, including testing/program understanding and fault protection. Although programmers have written more or less ad-hoc monitors since the birth of the computer, only recently (last decade) has this areas achieved a status as a field on its own. In this course we shall specifically focus on notations for specifying properties of Java programs, and frameworks for monitoring such. The course will initially address the issue of program instrumentation and monitoring using aspect oriented programming and Java. This will not only provide the student with a new useful technology but will also motivate tools presented later in the course. At the end of the course the student will have gained insight into the important problems in the field and will have encountered a core selection of solutions for monitoring programs. The course will enable the student to apply monitoring in software development as well as initiate research in this field. Although the course focuses on Java, the ideas extend to other languages.

We will study 3 systems: AspectJ (lectures 2-3), JavaMOP (lectures 4-7,) and RuleR (lecture 8).

Systems

• AspectJ (aspect oriented programming)
• MOP (monitoring oriented programming)
• RuleR (rule-based monitoring)

Lecture Plan

Lecture 1, Monday May 4 - Introduction

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture1.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture1.ppt.zip
• Note 1
• Resources (cover lectures 1-3!):
  1. AspectJ
  2. An Overview of AspectJ
  3. AspectJ Quick Reference

Lecture 2, Wednesday May 6 - Introduction to AspectJ

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture2.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture2.ppt.zip
• Note 2
• Resources: the same as for lecture 1.

Lecture 3, Monday May 11 - Monitoring with AspectJ

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture3.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture3.ppt.zip
• Note 3
• Resources: the same as for lecture 1.
• In addition the following Stack interface, Stack class and user program from the assignment:
  • StackInterface.java
  • Stack.java
  • Test.java
• The following Apache collections framework is used to implement the 3 classes (below): IdentityHashSet.java, WeakIdentityHashSet.java and WeakIdentityHashMap.java. These are useful for writing realistic monitors. Install the Apache package and the three classes. The java.util package already offers a IdentityHashMap.
  
  Identity means: objects (keys in the case of maps) are compared using == rather than equals(). This is important since monitored objects may get modfied by the monitored program.
  
  Weak means: the garbage collector will collect an object (key in the case of maps) if the only references left are weak (or of course if there are no references).
  
  
  • Apache commons collections
  • IdentityHashSet.java
  • WeakIdentityHashSet.java
  • WeakIdentityHashMap.java

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture4.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture4.ppt.zip
• Note 4
• Resources:
  1. Website: JavaMOP (specifically FSM and ERE)
  2. Paper: MOP: An Efficient and Generic Runtime Verification Framework
  3. Paper: Adding Trace Matching with Free Variables to AspectJ (optional reading)

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture5.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture5.ppt.zip
• Note 5
• Resources:
  1. Website: JavaMOP (specifically FSM and ERE).
  2. JavaMOP generates aspects. To run these you must have AspectJ installed.
  3. The aspects generated furthermore use Apache commons collections, which you also need to install as a library visible where you install the generated aspects.
  4. Test program and aspect for assignment 2:
     1. Test.java
     2. Monitor.aj
     Your task is to write the same spec as represented by the aspect, but using JavaMOP regular expressions or/and state machines (see the note for this lecture).
  5. In case you want to run Monitor.aj above, you need to download the classes IdentityHashSet.java and WeakIdentityHashSet.java from lecture 3.

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture6.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture6.ppt.zip
• Note 6
• Resources:
  1. Website: JavaMOP (specifically PTLTL and FTLTL)
  2. paper: Efficient Monitoring of Safety Properties (past time temporal logic)
  3. paper: Rewriting-based Techniques for Runtime Verification (future time temporal logic - optional reading, long paper)

Lecture 7, Friday May 29 - Context Free Grammars

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture7.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture7.ppt.zip
• Note 7
• Resources:
  1. Website: JavaMOP (specifically CFG)
  2. paper: Efficient Monitoring of Parametric Context-Free Patterns

Lecture 8, Rule-Based Systems

• Slides:
  • In pdf format: lecture8.pdf
  • In original powerpoint format: lecture8.ppt.zip
• Note 8
• resources:
  1. website: Rule-based runtime verification, Eagle and RuleR
  2. paper: Rule systems for run-time monitoring: from Eagle to RuleR
  3. RuleR: A Tutorial Guide, Version 0.1 (describes the RuleR monitoring framework)
  4. RuleR framework: to receive a copy of the RuleR tutorial and framework (set of jar files) send me an email: havelund@gmail.com