In data communications, cleartext is the form of a message or data which is transferred or stored without cryptographic protection. It is related to, but not entirely equivalent to, the term "plaintext". The phrases, "in clear" and "in the clear" are equivalent. For example, "The keys in the Foo protocol are exchanged as cleartext." would mean that the keys are not encrypted during transmission. A computer network is a system for communication among two or more computers. ... Cryptography (from Greek kryptós, hidden, and gráphein, to write) is, traditionally, the study of means of converting information from its normal, comprehensible form into an incomprehensible format, rendering it unreadable without secret knowledge — the art of encryption. ... The plain text term has a different meaning. ... A metasyntactic variable is a placeholder name, or a kind of alias term, commonly used to denote the subject matter under discussion, or a random member of a class of things under discussion. ... A cryptographic protocol is an abstract or concrete protocol that performs a security-related function and applies cryptographic methods. ... In communications, transmission is the act of transmitting electrical messages (and the associated phenonomena of radiant energy that pass through media). ...

Cleartext material is sometimes in plain text form, meaning a sequence of characters without formatting, but this is not strictly required as the sense is 'no protection from snooping', not 'no special software required to read'. Thus, "The form letter we wrote is stored on your disk in cleartext, that is -- in Microsoft Word format without encryption. And so is the email I sent -- that's in plain text (i.e., ASCII) form". Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ... Microsoft Word is a word processing application from Microsoft. ... Computer files can be divided into two broad categories: binary and text. ... Jump to: navigation, search There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ...

See also

• Plaintext
• Plain text