Abstract We introduce a generic approach for monitoring multithreaded programs online leveraging existing runtime verification (RV) techniques. In our setting, monitors are deployed to monitor specific threads and only exchange information upon reaching synchronization regions defined by the program itself. They use the opportunity of a lock in the program, to evaluate information across threads. As such, we refer to this approach as opportunistic monitoring. By using the existing synchronization, our approach reduces additional overhead and interference to synchronize at the cost of adding a delay to determine the verdict. We utilize a textbook example of readers-writers to show how opportunistic monitoring is capable of expressing specifications on concurrent regions. We also present a preliminary assessment of the overhead of our approach and compare it to classical monitoring showing that it scales particularly well with the concurrency present in the program.

This paper presents a flexible and modular approach to dynamic program analysis for JVM-based languages, aiming to address the limitations of existing tools, in particular their limited expressivity and tight coupling between instrumentation and analysis. The proposed solution decouples these two processes using BISM, a lightweight instrumentation language, and BeepBeep, a complex event processing engine. This novel combination enhances expressiveness, promotes reusability, and integrates seamlessly into JVM-based projects. Various analyses such as monitoring, profiling, coverage measurement, and complex event generation are demonstrated, showcasing the approach’s flexibility.