I need some help understanding what base64 is used for and how it is determined. I have been researching password encryption techniques and say for the salt example below, why is base64 used to generate the salt instead of ascii?
public static System.String CreateSalt( System.Int32 size )
{
// Instantiate a cryptographic random number generator.
System.Security.Cryptography.RNGCryptoServiceProvider rng =
new System.Security.Cryptography.RNGCryptoServiceProvider();
// Create an array to hold the randomly generated bytes.
System.Byte[] randomBytes = new System.Byte[ size ];
// Fill the array with randomly generated bytes.
rng.GetBytes( randomBytes );
// Return a Base64 string representation of the random number.
return System.Convert.ToBase64String( randomBytes );
}