A developer implements an API endpoint that accepts Basic Authentication. The credentials are 'admin:password' encoded as Base64. An analyst asks why Base64 is not encryption. What is the correct explanation?

• A.Base64 is an encoding scheme (not encryption) that represents binary data in ASCII text format. It has no key and is trivially reversible by anyone: 'admin:password' → 'YWRtaW46cGFzc3dvcmQ=' → 'admin:password'. Encryption requires a key and produces ciphertext that cannot be reversed without the key. Basic Auth credentials encoded in Base64 are effectively plaintext without TLS
• B.Base64 is a lossy compression scheme (it shrinks text to about 75 percent) and cannot be reversed without the original file: the credentials stay hidden unless the analyst holds that file in an uncompressed form on the same machine that captured the traffic during the investigation by the incident response team that was assigned to the case after the first alert was raised by the monitoring system
• C.