Endianness (Part II)

This is Part 2 of the Endianness Basics video series. In network programming Endianness is byte ordering used to store the data or to transmit the data over the medium. It is simply the method or protocol which decides which byte has to be stored at the lower order address and then the successive bytes storing in the memory. Generally the endianness is hardware dependent (there are few hardware where endianness is switchable) and there are two largely used methods viz. 1. Big Endian 2. Little Endian In Big endian notation, the most significant byte goes at the lower order address and the successive bytes take the higher order address places with lease significant byte at the most higher order place. Similarly, in Little endian notation, the least significant byte goes at lower order address and most significant byte at the higher order address. This video and the next video talk more about the endianness with some real life programming examples to explain how type casting of different length data works in big endian and little endian architectures.

Tags: endianness, big-endian, little-endian

Amit Vartak, 27 is working in wired and wireless security fields since last 3-4 years. His current area of interest includes IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) suite of protocols, vulnerabilities in these protocols and countermeasure for those vulnerabilities. Working on cutting edge tools and technology always keeps him busy. He has contributed from concept level to final prototyping for the presentations in Defcon 2007 (The Emperor Has No Cloak - WEP Cloaking Exposed) and Toorcon 2007 (Caffe latte attack). He holds 2 patents with USPTO (current status: Patent Pending) and a few papers in IEEE journals on wireless protocol vulnerabilities. Prior to this, he was working on MEMS (Micro Electro Mechanical Systems) and has published a few papers in SPIE and ICMAT. (Yeah… kindda orthogonal fields… but technology really doesn’t limit the talent :) He did his masters in Electrical Engineering from one of the premier institutes in India, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay (IIT-Bombay) and his under graduation, from University of Mumbai in Electronics and Telecommunication Engineering. He is currently working with AirTight Networks Inc. as a team lead in technology group since last 3 years.You can get in touch with him at amitcv[at]gmail[dot]com