Incomputing astorage violation is a hardware or softwarefault that occurs when atask attempts to access an area ofcomputer storage which it is not permitted to access.
Storage violation can, for instance, consist of reading from, writing to, or freeing storage not owned by the task. A common type of storage violation is known as astack buffer overflow where a program attempts to exceed the limits set for itscall stack. It can also refer to attempted modification of memory "owned" by another thread where there is incomplete (or no) memory protection.
Storage violations can occur in transaction systems such asCICS in circumstances where it is possible to write to storage not owned by the transaction; such violations can be reduced by enabling features such asstorage protection andtransaction isolation.
Storage violations can be difficult to detect as a program can often run for a period of time after the violation before it crashes. 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.
In systems such as CICS, storage violations are sometimes detected (by the CICSkernel) by the use of "signatures", which can be tested to see if they have been overlaid.
An alternative runtime library may be used to better detect storage violations, at the cost of additional overhead.[1]Some programming languages use softwarebounds checking to prevent these occurrences.
Some programdebugging software will also detect violations during testing.
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