12. Security Considerations

Base encoding is not encryption. It provides a binary-to-text representation and does not by itself provide confidentiality, integrity, or authentication.

Accepting non-alphabet characters can create covert channels or trigger parser differences. Loose handling of padding and pad bits can also allow several textual encodings for the same binary value, which matters for signatures, hashes, and canonical comparison.

Implementations should avoid buffer overflows, excessive allocation, and inconsistent error behavior when decoding very large inputs, invalid characters, or malformed padding.