Encoding Methods and Security

Flashcards covering the different types of encoding, their usage, and security implications.

Encoding

The process of putting a sequence of characters into a specialized format for efficient transmission or storage.

Decoding

The conversion of an encoded format back into the original sequence of characters.

ASCII

American Standard Code for Information Interchange, a commonly used encoding scheme for text files.

Unicode

A standardized encoding designed to unify different codepages and support all human languages.

UTF-8

A type of Unicode encoding using 1 byte for English characters and variable lengths for others; widely used.

UTF-16

A Unicode encoding form using 2 bytes for common characters, used in Windows, Java, and JavaScript.

UTF-32

A Unicode encoding form using 4 bytes per character; rarely used due to its size.

URI

A scheme that contains an optional authority, a path, an optional query, and an optional fragment.

URL

Uniform Resource Locator - a specific type of URI that identifies a resource and tells you how to access it or where it’s located.

URL Encoding

Converts reserved, unsafe, and non-ASCII characters in URLs to a universally accepted format.

HTML Encoding

Uses the format &#nnnn or &#xhhhh to represent Unicode code points in decimal or hexadecimal form, respectively.

Base64 Encoding

Encoding used to represent binary data as printable text for transport over mediums that require simple text.

Path Traversal (PT)

An attack that exploits weak access control implementations on the server side.

Malware

Malicious software intentionally written to cause damage or gain unauthorized access to a system.

CyberChef

A web app for carrying out various “cyber” operations in a web browser.