Endianness Converter

How it works

Endianness describes the order in which bytes of a multi-byte value are stored in memory. Big-endian (network byte order) stores the most significant byte first. Little-endian (used by x86/x64 and ARM in default mode) stores the least significant byte first.

For example, the 32-bit value 0xDEADBEEF is stored as DE AD BE EF in big-endian but as EF BE AD DE in little-endian. Getting this wrong is one of the most common mistakes in binary exploitation challenges.

In CTF challenges, endianness matters when constructing payloads for buffer overflow exploits (addresses must be written in little-endian on x86), reading values from memory dumps or core files, and repairing corrupted file headers where multi-byte fields like width and height are stored in a specific byte order.

Use this alongside the Number Base Converter to convert between hex and other bases, or the ASCII Table to decode individual bytes to characters. The Timestamp Converter is useful when you encounter a little-endian encoded timestamp in a binary file.

Network protocols (TCP/IP) use big-endian, so when analyzing packet captures you typically read multi-byte fields as-is. But when examining process memory or stack dumps on an x86 machine, every multi-byte value is little-endian. If you see 41 42 43 44 on the stack, the 32-bit integer value is actually 0x44434241 ("DCBA" in ASCII, not "ABCD").