Process Rewrite Systems for Software Model Checking

We consider the verification problem of multithreaded recursive programs. We use Process Rewrite Systems (PRS) to model such programs. This allows the use of all the existing results for the analysis of PRS to analyse multithreaded recursive programs. We first give a fully automatic translation from parallel recursive programs to PRS. As far as we know, this is the first time that a formal translation from multithreaded programs to PRS is given. The obtained PRS is an abstraction of the program. We identify a class of programs for which our translation is exact. We also propose a refinement procedure that allows to create more precise PRS models of a given program. We applied our techniques successfuly for the analysis of two versions of a Windows NT Bluetooth driver.