I need plain ASCII ciphertext… What can I do about those “gibberish” encrypted characters?
First, some background: The encryption process produces binary data… this is a natural and very desirable result! The designers of DES worked hard to assure that your ciphertext output would be statistically random. Being random means that all possible encrypted outputs are equally likely. Consider the single string character “a” represented internally by 8 bits (1 byte) – if we encrypt this character we get another 1 byte character that depends on the key (and IV) selected. This encrypted character may or may not be an alphanumeric or printable character… it might be the carriage return character, or the backspace character, or any one of the other non-printable characters from the total set of 256 characters that can be formed with 8 bits of data. This is how it should be. Now despite the fact that the encryption algorithm works as it should there are applications in which it is inconvenient, impractical or impossible to store, process or communicate binary data. Does that mean t
