In this thesis an operational semantics for a subset of the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is developed and presented. The subset contains standard operations such as control flow, computation, and memory management. In addition, the subset contains a treatment of parallel threads of execution.

The operational semantics are embedded into a μ-calculus based proof assistant, called the VeriCode Proof Tool (VCPT). VCPT has been developed at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), and has powerful features for proving inductive assertions.

Some examples of proving properties of programs using the embedding are presented.