XOP support
CXF JAXRS clients and endpoints can support XML-binary Optimized Packaging (XOP). What it means at the practical level is that a JAXB bean containing binary data is serialized using a multipart packaging, with the root part containing non-binary data only but also linking to co-located parts containing the actual binary payloads. Next it is deserialized into a JAXB bean on the server side.
If you would like to experiment with XOP then you need to set an "mtom-enabled" property on CXF jaxrs endpoints and clients.