Verifying temporal properties of programs: A parallel approach

Abstract

Due to the nature in dealing only with observed executions of a real system, runtime verification is being pursued as a lightweight verification technique. However, the overhead for analyzing the desired temporal properties usually degrades performance greatly. The reasons are: (1) the low efficiency of the interpretive execution in the analyzing process, and (2) nondeterminism of the automata generated from temporal logic properties. To overcome them, this paper presents a parallel approach to verify full regular temporal properties of a program. With this approach, the program is written in Modeling, Simulation and Verification Language (MSVL), and the property is specified by a Propositional Projection Temporal Logic (PPTL) formula. Execution and verification of a program are carried out at the same time. Specifically, each trace generated from executing a program is divided into several segments which are verified in parallel. Also, in the process of verifying each segment, nondeterministic choices in the relative automaton of a temporal property are also handled in parallel. Finally, verification results of all the segments are merged to form the eventual result as well as the counterexample. Our parallel mechanism takes full advantage of the hardware resources and makes temporal property verification efficient in a multi-core system. Experiments show that our approach is practical in verifying temporal properties of large-scale programs in the real world.