Question

While Base64 is a weak encryption standard it is still used to provide a basic means of encryption for email servers. Answer the following questions and provide a discussion about the Base64 Encryption Standard. Remember the initial posting is 100 words or more, and the replies are 60 words or more.

What is Base64?

Name two Services that use Base64?

Why is Base64 still used?

Answer 1

Basically Base64 converts a string of bytes into a string of ASCII characters so that they can be safely transmitted within HTTP headers. a byte consists of 8 bits. When encoding, Base64 will divide the string of bytes into groups of 6 bits and each group will map to one of 64 characters. These 64 characters are in the Base64 character table.

If the string of bytes cannot be divided into an exact number of groups of 6 bits, padding will be involved so that the padded string will be groups of 24 bits and then the encoding will be applied to the padded string. If a group of 6 bits is fully padded(doesn't contain any bit from the original bit), it will be mapped to "=" in the encoded string.

(1) What is Base64?

Base64 is such an encoding algorithm. It merely encodes arbitrary data using only ASCII characters, which is useful in many situations in which non-ASCII characters may not be handled correctly.

(2) Why Base64 is still used?

If I want to send

Hello
world!

One way is to send it in ASCII like

72 101 108 108 111 10 119 111 114 108 100 33

But byte 10 might not be interpreted correctly as a newline at the other end. So, we use a subset of ASCII to encode it like this

83 71 86 115 98 71 56 115 67 110 100 118 99 109 120 107 73 61 61

which at the cost of more data transferred for the same amount of information ensures that the receiver can decode the data in an intended way, even if the receiver happens to have different interpretations for the rest of the character set.

(3) Name two Services that use Base64?

MIMI

UTF-7