Specification and Runtime Verification of API Constraints on Interacting Objects

Most applications need to invoke some Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), e.g. JDK (Java Development Kit) API. When invoking those APIs, applications must follow some API constraints. Violation of these constraints will lead to some severe program defects. To detect this kind of defects, lots of static and dynamic approaches are explored, using formally described API constraints. While most existing approaches explore API constraints on a single object, this paper focuses on API constraints on interacting objects (COIOs). We proposed a novel specification language LACOIO (Language for API Constraint on Interacting Objects) which can cover all state-ofthe-art reported API COIOs. We implemented a LACOIO compiler which can automatically generate monitoring code for runtime verification from API constraints that are specified using LACOIO and implemented the runtime verification framework. We evaluated the proposed approach by comparing it with Tracematch – a popular constraint specification language. KeywordsRuntime verification; runtime monitoring; specification; program analysis.