EnCE EnCase Computer Forensics: The Official EnCase Certified Examiner Study Guide, 3rd Edition

Understanding Data

In the following sections, I’ll cover binary data first, which is how 1s and 0s are rendered into human-readable characters and numbers. Following that discussion, I’ll cover the hexadecimal representation of binary data. Because 1s and 0s aren’t very readable or workable in their raw form, programmers have developed an overlay by which binary data can be viewed and worked with that’s much easier. It’s simply called hex.

I’ll wrap up the discussion of data with the ASCII table and how each character or decimal number therein is represented by a binary and hexadecimal value. Because computing has become global, the limits of the ASCII table mean that not all the world’s languages can be represented by 1 byte or 256 different ...