Verifying Concurrent Stacks by Divergence-Sensitive Bisimulation

The verification of linearizability – a key correctness criterion for concurrent objects – is based on trace refinement whose checking is PSPACE-complete. This paper suggests to use branching bisimulation instead. Our approach is based on comparing an abstract specification in which object methods are executed atomically to a real object program. Exploiting divergence sensitivity, this also applies to progress properties such as lock-freedom. These results enable the use of polynomial-time divergence-sensitive branching bisimulation checking techniques for verifying linearizability and progress. We conducted the experiment on the lock-free stacks to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our methods.