Out of curosity of how to store passwords and user information as securly as possible, I found a set of crypto challenges at cryptopals.com.

    The first challenge(link above) of the beginner set is convert a hexidecimal string into base64.  While I created the program and recieved the correct output, the rule to only operate on raw bytes and not encoded strings,  I do not think I followed this.  

    I will research this more as I am able to allot more time to wrap my head around the syntax of this group of programmers.