Question:
Does the output of an encryption algorithm produce NULL characters (i.e. bytes having a 0 value)?
I need to know because I wish to save the encrypted output to a database as a string.
Answer:
All encryption algorithms produce binary output. All byte values (0-255) may be present in the encrypted output. Encrypted data has the same properties as random bytes (which is why it does not compress well — there are no recurring patterns necessary for lossless compression).
Chilkat provides methods for returning encrypted data as an encoded string (using us-ascii characters). Encryption methods ending in "ENC" return the binary encrypted data as an encoded string: EncryptBytesENC and EncryptStringENC. The EncodingMode property can be set to control the encoding of the output. EncodingMode is a string property and may be set to: "hex", "base64″, "url", or "quoted-printable".
