[jbeda]

Can confirm this is why we did it. Very confused to see Red Hat claim that Base64 was a security thing.

[smarterclayton]

I’m pretty sure the author just wasn’t as familiar with the topic as they should have been. Should have been caught during editing though.

As Joe notes, this was just how you most easily encode binary data in JSON. We did discuss that the encoding has a minor benefit to “over the shoulder reader” obscurity, but that wasn’t the goal.