NIS-3.1 Cryptography Explained: Plaintext, Ciphertext, Encryption & More 🔐

plaintext – information that can be directly read by humans or a machine (this article is an example of plaintext). Plaintext is a historic term pre-dating computers, when encryption was only used for hardcopy text, nowadays it is associated with many formats including music, movies and computer programs
ciphertext – the encrypted data
a cipher – the mathematics (or algorithm) responsible for turning plaintext into ciphertext and reverting ciphertext to plaintext (you might also see the word ‘code’ used – there is a technical difference between the two but it need not concern us now)
encryption – the process of converting plaintext to ciphertext (occasionally you may see it called ‘encipherment’)
decryption – the process of reverting ciphertext to plaintext (occasionally ‘decipherment’).