Runtime Checking for Program Verification

The process of verifying that a program conforms to its specification is often hampered by errors in both the program and the specification. A runtime checker that can evaluate formal specifications can be useful for quickly identifying such errors. This paper describes our preliminary experience with incorporating run-time checking into the Jahob verification system and discusses some lessons we learned in this process. One of the challenges in building a runtime checker for a program verification system is that the language of invariants and assertions is designed for simplicity of semantics and tractability of proofs, and not for run-time checking. Some of the more challenging constructs include existential and universal quantification, set comprehension, specification variables, and formulas that refer to past program states. In this paper, we describe how we handle these constructs in our runtime checker, and describe directions for future work.