Base64 Malleability in Practice
Konstantinos Chalkias, Panagiotis Chatzigiannis · Proceedings of the 2022 ACM on Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security · 2022
Base64 encoding has been a popular method to encode binary data into printable ASCII characters. It is commonly used in several serialization protocols, web, and logging applications, while it is oftentimes the preferred method for human-readable database fields. However, while convenient and with a better compression rate than hex-encoding, the large number of base64 variants in relted standards and proposed padding-mode optionality have been proven problematic in terms of security and cross-platform compatibility.