Decode the Evidence: Encodings, Tokens and Hash Integrity

<p>Konkan Port Logistics, a fictional Ratnagiri shipping company, is investigating a procurement officer who may have steered contracts to one vendor. Internal audit's forensic team exported exhibits from his work laptop under the company's investigation policy. Several are encoded, not encrypted, and one document may have been changed after the laptop was imaged.</p><p>In four lessons you learn the difference between encoding, encryption and hashing; how to recognise Base64, Base32, hex and URL encoding by their alphabets; how to peel layered encodings and simple XOR obfuscation with a known key; why decoding a JWT is not the same as verifying it; and how hash manifests prove integrity (and why MD5 and SHA-1 no longer do).</p><p>You work in Bartman's in-browser Crypto Workbench, a CyberChef-style recipe bench. The exhibits are generated for you. Part of the Bartman Cybersecurity track (Professional Certificate in Cybersecurity, LSBF).</p>

Tools: Encoding, Hashing, Digital forensics, JWT, CyberChef-style analysis