Thread: aes_encrypt/decrypt problem

I'm trying to setup a (relatively) simple encryption/decryption for a database I'm using. When I stepped into DB encryption a couple months ago, I found a really nice tutorial that did what I needed, but now I can't seem to track it down.

Right now, I'm just trying to find out what I'm doing wrong. I have two columns in the table 'test': 'id' and 'data'. 'id' is just an AI INT and 'data' is a BINARY(128). Here's what I do as a test:

Code:

INSERT INTO test (data) VALUES (AES_ENCRYPT('The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs.','0123456789abcdef'));

And it claims success, showing me a bunch of binary gibberish in the data field. When I try to read it:

Code:

SELECT AES_DECRYPT(data,'0123456789abcdef') FROM test;

it returns NULL... What am I doing wrong?

Disregard. I found my problem. The data field needed to be 'BLOB', not BINARY. Feel free to remove this thread.

Just a guess -- could it be the BINARY(128)? Seems to me that would append a bunch of 0x00 values to pad the result to 128 bytes -- which would cause the decrypt to fail. Does MySql have a datatype such as VARBINARY(128)?

Glad you got it sorted -- we probably cross posted.