FLTL-MC: Online High Level Program Analysis for Web Services

Although Java- or .NET- centric technologies are the most commonly used in Web services, they are by no means the only ones in practice. This paper proposes an online finite model checking tool FLTL-MC to check the high level safety and liveness properties in complex distributed web service systems, which can offer both a richer and more natural way to search errors. Liveness properties can specify desirable system behaviors which must be satisfied eventually, but are not always satisfied. Existing software model checkers cannot verify liveness in real code because doing so requires finding an infinite execution that does not satisfy aliveness property. In our proposed model, we adopt the finite linear temporal logic to specify the semantics of the online model checking, use binary instrumentation to obtain the distribute states and apply the FLTL-MC engine to dynamically verify the finite linear temporal logic properties in Web service systems. At last, we investigate the well-known distributed protocol WS-Reliable Messaging to demonstrate its applications and detect some hidden bugs with our prototype system.