According to one embodiment of the invention, a method of auditing memory in a system comprises receiving a request for memory from an application and populating a memory tag with a stack depth component and a traceback stack component. The traceback stack component contains a pointer to a traceback stack. The stack depth component defines a size of the traceback stack. The traceback stack contains information from a program stack associated with the application. The embodiment may further comprise determining if a memory pool has enough free memory to satisfy the request and allocating, from the memory pool, a memory allocation unit if the memory pool has enough free memory to satisfy the request. The memory allocation unit may include a data area and a footer. The data area defines an area to which the application may write data and the footer bounds the data area with a special code.