It's possible to hack away at someone else's encoding/encryption, but it's not easy or ideal.
If somebody needs you to decode/decrypt something, it probably means they didn't get provided the encryptor/encoder themselves. So whatever it is you're supposed to do, it's kind of a waste of time, or more trouble than it's worth.
When you encrypt something, you make an encryption engine that works with a decryption engine. They usually require some kind of base or key (random string and/or password and/or timestamp). What the encryptor actually does is up to the programmer. The point of an encryption engine is to distort the data given to it so it's unreadable by hackers/reverse software engineers and their programs.
When you encode something, I'm pretty sure that it shoudn't require a key. Encoding looks at each character, and uses some computational code to change them into a different character/string of characters/binary/hex/integer/float number or something different. The point is, using the decoder you can change it back to UTF-8 or ASCII- whatever it's designed to do- without the use of a key, contrary to encryption. The point of an encoding engine isn't really to hide the source code, since it doesn't require a key, anyone with the same decoder can easily reveal what lie beneath an encoded string.
Not to say web developers
don't use encoders to hide data, though the ones that do either aren't skilled or aren't applying their skills- that's not what an encoder is supposed to be for. base64encode(), for example, isn't for hiding your code.
wikipedia said:
Base64 encoding schemes are commonly used when there is a need to encode binary data that needs be stored and transferred over media that are designed to deal with textual data. This is to ensure that the data remains intact without modification during transport. Base64 is commonly used in a number of applications including
email via
MIME, and storing complex data in
XML.
PHP developers who use base64 as a way to hide source code are using it incorrectly, but there are plenty of people who do it, because it's so easy to use, reliable, and accessible.
Back to your problem:
If you have the encryptor/encoder, we might be able to help you. Looking at one of several strings (or even the entire project), isn't something I or anyone else would like to dedicate much time to- especially if it's well implemented encryption... Which is, by design, very time-consuming, if not impossible, for a normal human (or program) to look only at the end result in order to decrypt.
