In
cryptography, plaintext is information used as input to an
encryption algorithm; the output is termed
ciphertext. The plaintext could be, for example, a diplomatic message, a bank transaction, an e-mail, a diary and so forth — any information that someone might want to prevent others from reading. Typically the plaintext is the message in a form where no special effort has been made to make the information unreadable without special knowledge. In some systems, however, multiple layers of encryption are used, in which case the ciphertext output of one encryption algorithm becomes the plaintext input to the next.
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