Specifying Properties over Inter-procedural, Source Code Level Behaviour of Programs

• Published in: Runtime Verification pp. 23 - 41
• Main Authors: Dawes, Joshua Heneage, Bianculli, Domenico
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Dynamic analysis; Inter-procedural; Source code
• ISBN: 9783030884932; 3030884937
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88494-9_2

The problem of verifying a program at runtime with respect to some formal specification has led to the development of a rich collection of specification languages. These languages often have a high level of abstraction and provide sophisticated modal operators, giving a high level of expressiveness. In particular, this makes it possible to express properties concerning the source code level behaviour of programs. However, for many languages, the correspondence between events generated at the source code level and parts of the specification in question would have to be carefully defined. To enable expressing—using a temporal logic—properties over source code level behaviour without the need for this correspondence, previous work introduced Control-Flow Temporal Logic (CFTL), a specification language with a low level of abstraction with respect to the source code of programs. However, this work focused solely on the intra-procedural setting. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing Inter-procedural CFTL, a language for expressing source code level, inter-procedural properties of program runs. We evaluate the new language, iCFTL, via application to a real-world case study.