PGP & GPG

Cryptography Kindergarten 15

Plaintext and Ciphertext

Cryptography protects a message, or a piece of information.

This message can be an email message, your company’s finan-

cial records, a picture of your dog, or anything at all. In its

original unencrypted form, this information is in plaintext,

which is text that a person can look at and read without the

use of any special software. (In the case of a spreadsheet or a

digital photo, you need the proper software to view the plain-

text, but it’s usually viewable.)

After plaintext has been encrypted, a person looking at

it sees the ciphertext. For example, if you look at an encrypted

spreadsheet ...