Cleartext
In telecommunications, particularly data communications, cleartext is the form of a message or data which is transferred or stored without cryptographic protection. It is related to, but not entirely equivalent to, the term "plaintext". The phrases, "in clear" and "in the clear" are equivalent.
Thus, "The keys in the FOO protocol are exchanged as cleartext. That's so insecure it's a crock." To be fair, the FOO protocol might have been intended only for use over a secure channel and the fact that messages (ie, keys) are passed as cleartext might not be thought a problem. On the other hand, such a design would probably be a kludge, as a real secure channel is rather like a snark -- unavailable.
Cleartext material is sometimes in plain text form, meaning a sequence of characters without formatting, but this is not strictly required as the sense is 'no protection from snooping', not 'no special software required to read'. Thus, "The form letter we wrote is stored on your disk in cleartext, that is -- in Microsoft Word format without encryption. And so is the email I sent -- that's in plain text (ie, ASCII) form".
In use, the intended meaning of this term (and the related terms noted) are typically clear from context -- after a little experience..
See also
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