The First Lesson In Cybersecurity … Binary, Hex and Base64

But what about the other bases?

If you are into cybersecurity you should hopefully know all about hexademical and Base64 format. With hex, we have a character set of [0–9A-F]. But, we also have many other Base character sets, such as Base58 for Bitcoin, and Base45 for the EU Green Passport.

Base2

For “fred” we can represent our ASCII characters in a bit format, and where we have [here]:

01100110 01110010 01100101 01100100
  f        r        e       d

This is actually a Base-2 form.

Base16

It takes up too many characters for Base2, so we often group our bits into four, and then define the equivalent hex character. This then gives us [here]:

0110 0110 0111 0010 0110 0101 0110 0100
6    6    7    2    6    5    6    4

The Base16 form of “help “ is thus “ 68656C70”. Here is an example of the conversion:

Base-64

Another common format is Base64, and which uses a character set of “[A-Za-z0–9+/=]”…