What Is ASCII-Armor?

If you're into cryptography or computer security, you might be familiar with an excellent idea of ASCII-Armor. If you're not, don't worry; We'll explain it all in an enlightening and enjoyable way. Let's begin by defining ASCII-Armor. The basic gist: it's a way to convert the ones and zeroes that make up computer data into human-readable ASCII text. You may wonder, " Why would we want to do that?" Simply put, it's about making the data more easily transferable and portable. If you wanted to send some binary data over the internet, you'd need to find a way to keep all the data intact and ensure the receiver could read it. As such, ASCII-Armor is necessary. Binary information can be sent as plain text and converted to an ASCII string, which the intended recipient can then read and decode back into binary. Let's dive into the nitty-gritty now. ASCII-Armor encoding represents each binary data byte as two ASCII characters. Base64 encoding is used for this purpose by giving each possible combination of six bits a specific printable character. With the binary data partitioned into six-bit chunks, each of which is then converted into the appropriate ASCII character, a string of text is created that can be easily transmitted. Yes, but there's more! The functionality of ASCII-Armor extends beyond the simple act of translating binary information into human-readable text. Extra data is included to guarantee proper and secure data transmission. For instance, the encoded text may feature a checksum that can be used to ensure the integrity of the transmitted data. There's a header and footer there, too, detailing the data being sent and whom it's coming from. In conclusion, that was a brief and amusing overview of ASCII-Armor. It's not the most riveting discussion, but it's vital to cryptography and computer security. Who would have thought many digits could have such a practical and helpful result?