Learning advanced data manipulation techniques

In this section, we’ll explore various data encoding, encryption, and hashing algorithms that are common to testing web application security. You can put these functions in your .bashrc file and call them in your scripts. The following functions can be found in this chapter’s GitHub repository as ch09_data_functions.sh.

Base64 encoding is a method for converting binary data into an ASCII string format by encoding it into a Base64 representation. This encoding uses a set of 64 characters, including uppercase and lowercase letters (A-Z, a-z), digits (0-9), and the symbols + and /, to represent the data. The primary purpose of Base64 encoding is to ensure that binary data, such as images or files, can be safely transmitted over media that are designed to handle textual data, such as email and URLs, without corruption. Base64 encoding also adds padding with the = character to ensure the encoded data is a multiple of 4 bytes...