In computing a storage violation is a hardware or software fault that occurs when a task attempts to access an area of computer storage which it is not permitted to access.
For example, a pointer to a freed area of memory can be retained and later reused causing an error.
As a result, efforts focus on detecting violations as they occur, rather than later when the problem is observed.
An alternative runtime library may be used to better detect storage violations, at the cost of additional overhead.
[1] Some programming languages use software bounds checking to prevent these occurrences.