Runtime verification consists in checking whether a system satisfies a given specification by observing the execution trace it produces. In the regular setting, the modal μ-calculus provides a versatile formalism for expressing specifications of the control flow of the system. This paper focuses on the data flow and studies an extension of that logic that allows it to express data-dependent properties, identifying fragments that can be verified at runtime and with what correctness guarantees. The logic studied here is closely related with register automata with guessing. That correspondence yields a monitor synthesis algorithm, and a strict hierarchy among the various fragments of the logic, in contrast to the regular setting. We then exhibit a fragment of the logic that can express all monitorable formulae in the logic without greatest fixed-points but not in the full logic, and show this is the best we can get.

The asynchronous and unidirectional communication model supported by mailboxes is a key reason for the success of actor languages like Erlang and Elixir for implementing reliable and scalable distributed systems. While many actors may send messages to some actor, only the actor may (selectively) receive from its mailbox. Although actors eliminate many of the issues stemming from shared memory concurrency, they remain vulnerable to communication errors such as protocol violations and deadlocks. Mailbox types are a novel behavioural type system for mailboxes first introduced for a process calculus by de’Liguoro and Padovani in 2018, which capture the contents of a mailbox as a commutative regular expression. Due to aliasing and nested evaluation contexts, moving from a process calculus to a programming language is challenging. This paper presents Pat, the first programming language design incorporating mailbox types, and describes an algorithmic type system. We make essential use of quasi-linear typing to tame some of the complexity introduced by aliasing. Our algorithmic type system is necessarily co-contextual, achieved through a novel use of backwards bidirectional typing, and we prove it sound and complete with respect to our declarative type system. We implement a prototype type checker, and use it to demonstrate the expressiveness of Pat on a factory automation case study and a series of examples from the Savina actor benchmark suite.

Abstract We present a synthetic benchmarking framework that targets the systematic evaluation of RV tools for message-based concurrent systems. Our tool can emulate various load profiles via configuration. It provides a multi-faceted view of measurements that is conducive to a comprehensive assessment of the overhead induced by runtime monitoring. The tool is able to generate significant loads to reveal edge case behaviour that may only emerge when the monitoring system is pushed to its limit. We evaluate our framework in two ways. First, we conduct sanity checks to assess the precision of the measurement mechanisms used, the repeatability of the results obtained, and the veracity of the behaviour emulated by our synthetic benchmark. We then showcase the utility of the features offered by our tool in a two-part RV case study.