  Verifying safety and liveness over array systems is a highly challenging
problem. Array systems naturally capture parameterized systems such as
distributed protocols with an unbounded number of processes. Such distributed
protocols often exploit process IDs during their computation, resulting in
array systems whose element values range over an infinite domain. In this
paper, we develop a novel framework for proving safety and liveness over array
systems. The crux of the framework is to overapproximate an array system as a
string rewriting system (i.e. over a finite alphabet) by means of a new
predicate abstraction that exploits the so-called indexed predicates. This
allows us to tap into powerful verification methods for string rewriting
systems that have been heavily developed in the last few decades (e.g. regular
model checking). We demonstrate how our method yields simple, automatically
verifiable proofs of safety and liveness properties for challenging examples,
including Dijkstra's self-stabilizing protocol and the Chang-Roberts leader
election protocol.
