potential leak
Allocated memory to which there is no direct pointer (pointer that references the start of the block), but for which there is a pointer to some other location within the allocated block.
In order to free this memory, the program must subtract an offset from the pointer to the interior of the block. In general, you should consider a potential leak to be an actual leak until you can prove that it is not by identifying the code that performs this subtraction.
(C) Copyright IBM Corporation 1993, 2009.