Automatic and configurable instrumentation of C programs with temporal assertion checkers

Abstract

The long-term goal of the work presented here is the automatic instrumentation of C programs with temporal property checkers to perform the runtime verification that these programs behave as expected, both for debugging purposes and for security or safety-oriented monitoring. This paper describes our first results towards this objective. To give requirements engineers or software developers the possibility to express advanced properties, the chosen specification language is the IEEE standard PSL (Property Specification Language). From PSL properties, a tool automatically generates assertion checkers and instruments the program with these verification components together with an observation mechanism that enables their event-driven activation. For maximum flexibility, the current implementation proposes either to decorate the source code or to observe the binary code under execution. An analysis of these solutions is achieved by means of experimental results.