A method and system to identifying the use of dangling pointers in software instrumentation irrespective of the location of the pointer in the memory. The main memory is preferably segmented into three parts defined as a first memory, a version segment and a pointer version segment. By use of the version segment and pointer version stored in the pointer version segment, checksum are made on a pointer version with a version on dereferencing a pointer in the first memory to identify references to a dangling pointer on negative determination. Identified dangling pointer may be reported to the end user.