Proactive Real-Time First-Order Enforcement

Abstract Modern software systems must comply with increasingly complex regulations in domains ranging from industrial automation to data protection. Runtime enforcement addresses this challenge by empowering systems to not only observe, but also actively control, the behavior of target systems by modifying their actions to ensure policy compliance. We propose a novel approach to the proactive real-time enforcement of policies expressed in metric first-order temporal logic (MFOTL). We introduce a new system model, define an expressive MFOTL fragment that is enforceable in that model, and develop a sound enforcement algorithm for this fragment. We implement this algorithm in a tool calledWhyEnfand carry out a case study on enforcing GDPR-related policies. Our tool can enforce all policies from the study in real-time with modest overhead. Our work thus provides the first tool-supported approach that can proactively enforce expressive first-order policies in real time.