Cryptography Terminology

Key

Encryption

Cipher

Cryptography

Ciphertext

Plaintext $($cleartext$)$

Is data or text that has not been encrypted.

describes the study of encoding data so it is kept confidential between two parties.

is a piece of data that is used to encrypt or decrypt a message or other blocks of data.

is data or text that has been encoded.

or method used to encrypt$/$decrypt data. is the algorithm

basically worka as a black box, where cleartext and a key go in and ciphertext comes out