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Little Endian And The Advantages And Disadvantages Of Each Approach

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1. Describe Big Endian, Little Endian and the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.
“Memory is a lot like a large array but rather than using the term “index” to indicate specific locations in memory; we use the term “address”. Each address stores one element at the level of the byte” (Curran, 2006). Although some data types exceed 1 byte; they can be assigned to span more than a single byte to accommodate larger values.
Within a byte the value is determined by checking the bits right to left. This means that the right most $#$#0$#$# can be ‘o’ or ‘1’ value and any bits towards the left indicate a higher value. There are two ways in which data can be stored in memory. “The “little endian” approach stores new values in a way that starts at the left and expands to the right, so that each new piece of data is added to the right”, …show more content…

The small endian has the advantage that it doesn’t feature the overhead of shifting bytes all over the place that big endian involves. Additionally once conceived in the above light (the last example), small endian surpasses big endian in terms of understandability.
2. Describe what an overflow is and how it occurs. Describe some of the problems that overflow causes, one area that you should research (among others) is the concept of integer based security attacks.
Basically an overflow is the result where a digit for example, is too large to occupy a certain memory space and thereby smears other memory locations corrupting data or presenting a security risk to the operating system. The result of an overflow can cause erratic program behavior, memory access errors, incorrect results, software vulnerabilities and/or the crash of the operating system.
According to Wikipedia ("Overflow - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia," 2015), there are many types of overflow

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