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In cryptography, ciphertext or cyphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. [1] Ciphertext is also known as encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher to decrypt it.
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. The operation of a cipher usually depends on a piece of auxiliary information, called a key (or, in traditional NSA parlance, a cryptovariable ).
Ciphertext indistinguishability is a property of many encryption schemes. Intuitively, if a cryptosystem possesses the property of indistinguishability, then an adversary will be unable to distinguish pairs of ciphertexts based on the message they encrypt.
Padding a message's payload before encrypting it can help obscure the cleartext's true length, at the cost of increasing the ciphertext's size and introducing or increasing bandwidth overhead. Messages may be padded randomly or deterministically , with each approach having different tradeoffs.
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 ciphertext is sent through an insecure channel to the recipient. The recipient decrypts the ciphertext by applying an inverse decryption algorithm, recovering the plaintext. To decrypt the ciphertext, the recipient requires a secret knowledge from the sender, usually a string of letters, numbers, or bits, called a cryptographic key. The ...
Plaintext is used as input to an encryption algorithm; the output is usually termed ciphertext, particularly when the algorithm is a cipher. Codetext is less often used, and almost always only when the algorithm involved is actually a code .
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.