# Salt Channels

One of the fundamental features of Salt is remote execution. Salt has two basic "channels" for communicating with minions. Each channel requires a client (minion) and a server (master) implementation to work within Salt. These pairs of channels will work together to implement the specific message passing required by the channel interface. Channels use Transports for sending and receiving messages.

## Pub Channel

The pub (or pubish) channel is how a master sends a job (payload) to a minion. This is a basic pub/sub paradigm, which has specific targeting semantics. All data which goes across the publish system should be encrypted such that only members of the Salt cluster can decrypt the published payloads.

## Req Channel

The req channel is how the minions send data to the master. This interface is primarily used for fetching files and returning job returns. The req channels have two basic interfaces when talking to the master. `send` is the basic method that guarantees the message is encrypted at least so that only minions attached to the same master can read it-- but no guarantee of minion-master confidentiality, whereas the `crypted_transfer_decode_dictentry` method does guarantee minion-master confidentiality. The req channel is also used by the salt cli to publish jobs to the master.