On the Expressiveness of some Runtime Validation Techniques

Runtime validation techniques have been proposed as artifacts to detect and/or correct unforeseen behaviours of computer systems. Their common features is to give only partial validation results, based on a restricted set of system executions produced in the real execution environment. A key issue is thus to better understand which kind of properties can (or cannot) be validated using such techniques. We focus on three techniques known as runtime verification, property-oriented testing, and runtime enforcement. We present these approaches at an abstract level and in a unified framework, and we discuss their respective ability to deal with properties on infinite execution sequences, that are commonly encountered in many application domains.