Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation, VMCAI 2004, held in Venice, Italy in January 2004. The 22 revised full papers presented together with 4 invited contributions were carefully reviewed and selected from 68 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on security, formal methods, model checking, software checking, liveness and completeness, and miscellaneous.