I noticed that the string ICAgICAgICAgICAgICAg, in various repeating lengths, appears fairly often in public key certificates and ciphertexts.
What does this mean? Is it some kind of padding? Is it a quirk of the encryption?
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6Are you sure about the ciphertexts? It's actually impossible as the result of any usable encryption is a random-looking byte sequence. The probability of 15 consecutive spaces is 2**-120, i.e., practically zero.– maaartinusDec 2, 2019 at 1:54
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17It means the certificate is made out of a polymer of Silver, Iodine and Carbon. The length of the chain depends on how long the certificate needs to be.– JDLDec 2, 2019 at 17:14
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2 Answers
ICAg represents three spaces when text is base64-encoded.
For example:
echo -n ' hello world' | openssl base64
produces:
ICAgICAgaGVsbG8gd29ybGQ=
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9Is there any particular reason why three spaces might be a common occurrence in public key certificates? Dec 1, 2019 at 20:40
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9Any long string of spaces would turn into n blocks of 3 spaces plus a maybe a final block of one or two spaces plus other characters Dec 1, 2019 at 22:49
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@DélissonJunio it should not be a common occurrence. There's no reason to add pointless blank space to a certificate, and in a ciphertext it's even more concerning. Dec 1, 2019 at 23:57
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14@StopHarmingMonica My guess is that the text before encoding had indentation using spaces.– BarmarDec 2, 2019 at 8:36
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7@StopHarmingMonica Certificates do not contain any ciphertext. They often contain base-64 encoded text though. Dec 2, 2019 at 11:21
The accepted answer doesn't show how to get the answer (it shows, how to verify it). Use
echo 'ICAgICAgICAgICAgICAg' | base64 -d
(producing a bunch of spaces) or
echo 'ICAgICAgICAgICAgICAg' | base64 -d | hexdump -C
producing
00000000 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 | |
0000000f
to see what's inside.
