A natural way to specify component-based systems is by an interface specification. Such a specification allows clients of a component to know not only its syntactic properties, as is current practice, but also its semantic properties. Any component implementation must be a behavioral refinement of its interface specification. We propose the use of executable specifications and a runtime monitor to check for behavioral equivalence between a component and its specification. Furthermore, we take advantage of the COM infrastructure to perform this kind of runtime verification without any instrumentation of the implementation, i.e., without any re-compilation or re-linking.

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