In data communications, cleartext's a message or data in a form that's immediately comprehensible to a human being without additional processing. In particular, it implies that this message's transferred or stored without cryptographic protection. The phrases, "in clear", "en clair" and "in the clear" are equivalent. For example, "The keys in the Foo protocol are exchanged as cleartext." would mean that the keys aren't encrypted during transmission. Cleartext might be preprocessed by an open alg… (More on Cleartext)