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Base 64 vs. Hex

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aberent
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 8:04 pm    Post subject: Base 64 vs. Hex Reply with quote

Base 64 vs. Hex

Many cryptographic protocols (ex PGP) convert the final output to base 64 encoding in order to make the cipher text displayable in things such as command windows, text editors and email clients. Simply said some bytes are just not displayable as text and encoding in base 64 solves that issue.

However my question is why not simply display the data in HEX values converted to strings. So 123456 would be displayed as: 1E240. This guarantees that all different byte combinations are displayable as text as well as removes the complication of implementing the base 64 algorithm. The idea being, remove the complexity from the system to make it more secure.

Any ideas why this is not a good solution?
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b4rtm4n
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PostPosted: Sun Jan 11, 2004 11:47 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Doesn't this have sommit to do with uucp or smtp?

Some hex strings being interpreted command codes etc?

b64 eliminates the cc issues?

isn't this what mime was supposed to fix?

Not really an answer but I've had a bit to drink and atm it seems to make sense as an explanation.

Very Happy
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