Igor’s Tip of the Week #133: Alignment items

Sometimes you may see mysterious align keywords in the disassembly, which can appear both in code and data areas:

Usually they’re only apparent in the text view.

These directives are used by many assemblers to indicate alignment to a specific address boundary, usually a power of two. IDA uses it to replace potentially irrelevant bytes by a short one-liner, both for more compact listing and to indicate that this part of the binary is probably not interesting. 

Depending on the …

address alignment assembler binary code data disassembly ida listing malware analysis may power processor text