Converting messages into numbers in order to apply mathematical operations: 1. take the ordinal bytes of the message 2. convert them into hexadecimal 3. concatenate -> this is interpreted as a base-16/hexadecimal number (also can be represented in base-10/decimal) ex) message: HELLO ascii bytes: [72, 69, 76, 76, 79] hex bytes: [0x48, 0x45, 0x4c, 0x4c, 0x4f] base-16: 0x48454c4c4f base-10: 3104002..