Glossary
Endianness
The byte order in which multi-byte integers are stored in memory: little-endian (LSB first) or big-endian (MSB first).
Endianness describes the order in which the bytes of a multi-byte integer are stored in memory. In little-endian systems (x86, x86-64, ARM by default) the least significant byte comes first; in big-endian systems (network byte order, some MIPS/SPARC configurations) the most significant byte comes first. For example, the 32-bit value 0x12345678 is stored as 78 56 34 12 in little-endian and 12 34 56 78 in big-endian. Misreading endianness when parsing binary protocols or file headers is a very common beginner mistake during static analysis.