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With the advent of computing, the term plaintext expanded beyond human-readable documents to mean any data, including binary files, in a form that can be viewed or used without requiring a key or other decryption device. Information—a message, document, file, etc.—if to be communicated or stored in an unencrypted form is referred to as ...
Text file with portion of The Human Side of Animals by Royal Dixon, displayed by the command cat in an xterm window. In computing, plain text is a loose term for data (e.g. file contents) that represent only characters of readable material but not its graphical representation nor other objects (floating-point numbers, images, etc.).
One of the most famous military encryption developments was the Caesar cipher, in which a plaintext letter is shifted a fixed number of positions along the alphabet to get the encoded letter. A message encoded with this type of encryption could be decoded with a fixed number on the Caesar cipher.
When using a cipher the original information is known as plaintext, and the encrypted form as ciphertext. The ciphertext message contains all the information of the plaintext message, but is not in a format readable by a human or computer without the proper mechanism to decrypt it.
Until modern times, cryptography referred almost exclusively to "encryption", which is the process of converting ordinary information (called plaintext) into an unintelligible form (called ciphertext). [13] Decryption is the reverse, in other words, moving from the unintelligible ciphertext back to plaintext.
The table on the right is an aid for converting between plaintext and ciphertext using the characters at left as the key. In cryptography , the one-time pad ( OTP ) is an encryption technique that cannot be cracked , but requires the use of a single-use pre-shared key that is larger than or equal to the size of the message being sent.
In computer programming, Base64 is a group of binary-to-text encoding schemes that transforms binary data into a sequence of printable characters, limited to a set of 64 unique characters.
The basic use of frequency analysis is to first count the frequency of ciphertext letters and then associate guessed plaintext letters with them. More Xs in the ciphertext than anything else suggests that X corresponds to e in the plaintext, but this is not certain; t and a are also very common in English, so X might be either of