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#Purpose of base64 encoding download

The encryption technique aims at making data unreadable and hard to decode. However, the purpose of encryption is different from the encoding's one.

For this reason, sometimes, people use the terms encryption and encoding interchangeably. It transforms data from one representation to another. In a way, encryption is a form of encoding. In fact, the question is not far-fetched. Wait! Isn't this transformation the same as encoding after all? 🤔 So, basically, encryption is a mechanism that transforms data into a different representation so that prying eyes cannot understand it. You can transform a piece of data from one representation to another and then go back to the original representation without information loss.Įncryption is a technique that makes your data unreadable and hard to decode for an unauthorized user. On the contrary, it is public in order to facilitate interoperability between systems.įinally, encoding is a reversible process. The conversion algorithm is not kept secret. Anyone who knows the conversion algorithm can encode and decode data. It allows systems that use different data representations to share information.Įncoding has no security purpose.

#Purpose of base64 encoding download

If you want to learn more about JWTs, you can download the JWT Handbook.Įncoding ensures interoperability between systems. This encoding mechanism allows the token to be easily passed in HTML and HTTP environments without fear of clashes with reserved or unrepresentable characters. You can see the decoded version of this JWT using the jwt.io debugger. bql -jxlG9B_bielkqOnjTY9Di9FillFb6IMQINXoYsw eyJpc3MiOiJodHRwOi8vbXktZG9tYWluLmF1dGgwLmNvbSIsInN1YiI6ImF1dGgwfDEyMzQ1NiIsImF1ZCI6IjEyMzRhYmNkZWYiLCJleHAiOjEzMTEyODE5NzAsImlhdCI6MTMxMTI4MDk3MCwibmFtZSI6IkphbmUgRG9lIiwiZ2l2ZW5fbmFtZSI6IkphbmUiLCJmYW1pbHlfbmFtZSI6IkRvZSJ9. The following is an example of encoded JWT: eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.

The three parts that compose a token are encoded using Base64-URL, a variant of Base64 encoding combined with URL encoding.

URL encoding, useful to represent arbitrary data in an URL, where some characters are reserved or cannot be used (think of spaces or colons, for example).Ĭonsider JSON Web Tokens (JWT), for example.

Base64, which lets you represent binary data, such as an image, through text.

Unicode, which allows you to represent more complex items than letters, such as emoji and other symbols.

To mention just a few in the character encoding space, apart from the dear old ASCII, you have: You can find several encoding mechanisms out there. Usually, it involves a conversion table, such as an ASCII table in our example, that maps a representation item in one system to the corresponding representation item in the other system. So, encoding is just a transformation from one data representation to another, keeping the same information. Commonly, you say that the sequence of letters has been encoded into a sequence of bits. The letter-based representation is usually understood by human systems the bit-based representation is more suitable for computer systems. You have two representations for the same information. This is a handy representation for humans but not so easy for being manipulated by computers. When you have some information, say the name of the mineral that weakens Superman, you can represent it through letters, as in kryptonite. You can define it as a technique to transform data from one format to another so that it can be understood and consumed by different systems.īasically, encoding has to do with information representation.