Hi all, your thoughts appreciated: I''d like to encrypt one of my databases, as described in the first Rails book, by putting encrypt and decrypt methods on the :after_find, :before_save, and :after_save hooks in my model (what a lovely transparent way rails does things!). But unlike the book, I actually want to use real encryption, perhaps something from the OpenSSL library, something that requires a symmetric key, that I will ask the user to enter at login. Either that or just use some hash of the user''s login password. Either way, I''ll store this encryption key in the session, my thinking being that not storing the keys permanently will help prevent any nosy sysadmin seeing the data, even with the source code. My question is this, how might I get the encryption key from my session into the model to do the (de|en)cryption? The session hash is not available to the model as this violates MVC apparently. I don''t want to have to pass the key as a parameter on every method call to the model, or do all the decryption in the controller, as this would be repeating myself, and not using the nice transparency that Activerecord offers. Is it possible to inject the value somehow, or register some callback from the model into the controller, or am I going about this the wrong way entirely?! Stu