Monitoring Second-Order Hyperproperties
This addresses the need for runtime verification of complex system properties in AI fields like knowledge representation and planning, representing a novel advancement beyond existing first-order methods.
The paper tackles the problem of monitoring second-order hyperproperties at runtime, which are more expressive than first-order ones and include properties like common knowledge, by introducing Hyper$^2$LTL$_f$ and presenting monitoring algorithms for parallel and sequential execution models, with experimental results from benchmarks.
Hyperproperties express the relationship between multiple executions of a system. This is needed in many AI-related fields, such as knowledge representation and planning, to capture system properties related to knowledge, information flow, and privacy. In this paper, we study the monitoring of complex hyperproperties at runtime. Previous work in this area has either focused on the simpler problem of monitoring trace properties (which are sets of traces, while hyperproperties are sets of sets of traces) or on monitoring first-order hyperproperties, which are expressible in temporal logics with first-order quantification over traces, such as HyperLTL. We present the first monitoring algorithm for the much more expressive class of second-order hyperproperties. Second-order hyperproperties include system properties like common knowledge, which cannot be expressed in first-order logics like HyperLTL. We introduce Hyper$^2$LTL$_f$, a temporal logic over finite traces that allows for second-order quantification over sets of traces. We study the monitoring problem in two fundamental execution models: (1) the parallel model, where a fixed number of traces is monitored in parallel, and (2) the sequential model, where an unbounded number of traces is observed sequentially, one trace after the other. For the parallel model, we show that the monitoring of the second-order hyperproperties of Hyper$^2$LTL$_f$ can be reduced to monitoring first-order hyperproperties. For the sequential model, we present a monitoring algorithm that handles second-order quantification efficiently, exploiting optimizations based on the monotonicity of subformulas, graph-based storing of executions, and fixpoint hashing. We present experimental results from a range of benchmarks, including examples from common knowledge and planning.