Investigating Optimal Progress Measures for Verification of the WebSocket Protocol

The sweep-line method is a state space reduction technique formemory-efficient on-the-fly verification of concurrent systems. Themethod relies on a progress measure capturing inherent progress in thesystem under verification to store only fragments of the state space inmemory at a time and thereby reduce peak memory usage. The sweep-line method has been applied to many concurrent systems, but theoptimality of progress measures in terms of the peak number of statesstored has not been investigated. Assessing the optimality of a progressmeasure is important since memory in most cases is the limiting factorin verification using state spaces. We derive lower bounds for the peaknumber states and present initial experimental results on near optimalprogress measures for verification of the IETF WebSocket protocol