Monitoring-Oriented Programming: A Tool-Supported Methodology for Higher Quality Object-Oriented Software

This paper presents a tool-supported methodological paradigm for object-oriented software development, called monitoring-oriented programming and abbreviated MOP, in which runtime monitoring is a basic software design principle. The general idea underlying MOP is that software developers insert specifications in their code via annotations. Actual monitoring code is automatically synthesized from these annotations before compilation and integrated at appropriate places in the program, according to user-defined configuration attributes. This way, the specification is checked at runtime against the implementation. Moreover, violations and/or validations of specifications can trigger user-defined code at any points in the program, in particular recovery code, outputting or sending messages, or raising exceptions. The MOP paradigm does not promote or enforce any specific formalism to specify requirements: it allows the users to plug-in their favorite or domain-specific specification formalisms via logic plug-in modules. There are two major technical challenges that MOP supporting tools unavoidably face: monitor synthesis and monitor integration. The former is heavily dependent on the specification formalism and comes as part of the corresponding logic plug-in, while the latter is uniform for all specification formalisms and depends only on the target programming language. An experimental prototype tool, called Java-MOP, is also discussed, which currently supports most but not all of the desired MOP features. MOP aims at reducing the gap between formal specification and implementation, by integrating the two and allowing them together to form a system

Automatically Leveraging MapReduce Frameworks for Data-Intensive Applications

MapReduce is a popular programming paradigm for developing large-scale, data-intensive computation. Many frameworks that implement this paradigm have recently been developed. To leverage these frameworks, however, developers must become familiar with their APIs and rewrite existing code. Casper is a new tool that automatically translates sequential Java programs into the MapReduce paradigm. Casper identifies potential code fragments to rewrite and translates them in two steps: (1) Casper uses program synthesis to search for a program summary (i.e., a functional specification) of each code fragment. The summary is expressed using a high-level intermediate language resembling the MapReduce paradigm and verified to be semantically equivalent to the original using a theorem prover. (2) Casper generates executable code from the summary, using either the Hadoop, Spark, or Flink API. We evaluated Casper by automatically converting real-world, sequential Java benchmarks to MapReduce. The resulting benchmarks perform up to 48.2x faster compared to the original.Comment: 12 pages, additional 4 pages of references and appendi

LARVA - safer monitoring of real-time Java programs (tool paper)

The use of runtime verification, as a lightweight approach to guarantee properties of systems, has been increasingly employed on real-life software. In this paper, we present the tool LARVA, for the runtime verification of properties of Java programs, including real-time properties. Properties can be expressed in a number of notations, including timed-automata enriched with stopwatches, Lustre, and a subset of the duration calculus. The tool has been successfully used on a number of case-studies, including an industrial system handling financial transactions. LARVA also performs analysis of real-time properties, to calculate, if possible, an upper-bound on the memory and temporal overheads induced by monitoring. Moreover, through property analysis, LARVA assesses the impact of slowing down the system through monitoring, on the satisfaction of the properties.peer-reviewe

A taxonomy of approaches for integrating attack awareness in applications

Software applications are subject to an increasing number of attacks, resulting in data breaches and financial damage. Many solutions have been considered to help mitigate these attacks, such as the integration of attack-awareness techniques. In this paper, we propose a taxonomy illustrating how existing attack awareness techniques can be integrated into applications. This work provides a guide for security researchers and developers, aiding them when choosing the approach which best fits the needs of their application