A very useful way to tell if a set of data is encrypted, encoded, or obfuscated is to analyze the frequency at which each character repeats inside the data. In a cleartext message, say a letter for example, the ASCII characters in the alphanumeric range (32 to 126) will have a much higher frequency than slashes or nonprintable characters, such as the Escape (27) or Delete (127) keys.
On the other hand, one would expect that an encrypted file would have a very similar frequency for every character from 0 to 255.
This can be tested by preparing a simple set of files to compare with. Let's compare a plaintext file as base with two other versions of that file: one obfuscated and the other encrypted. First create a plaintext ...
