> From: openssl-users On Behalf Of Prashant Bapat > Sent: Wednesday, March 18, 2015 03:37 > I'm trying to use the base64 decode function in C. <snip> > This works well for simple b64 encoded strings like "hello world!" etc. > But when I want to b64 decode the contents of a SSH public key, it fails. Returns nothing. It returns pointer to a buffer containing the pubkey, but no indication of the length. You don't show the caller, but if the caller tries to treat it as a C string with strlen()fputs() etc that won't work because it isn't a C string. A C string can't contain any zero-bits aka null byte, and SSH pubkey contains many of them; it even starts with *three* consecutive nulls, which makes it appear to be empty if treated as a C string. Use the length returned from (successful) BIO_read (b64bio,...). > This decodes fine. > "dGhpcyBpcyBhd2Vzb21lCg==" : "this is awesome" Actually that decodes as "this is awesome" PLUS A NEWLINE, or in C source notation "this is awesome\n". Yes that matters.
