A bit of a Ruby newbie here - should be an easy question: I want to use the encrypted_strings gem to create a password encrypted string: (from http://rdoc.info/projects/pluginaweek/encrypted_strings)

Question is: Everything works fine, but how come I don't need the password to decrypt the string? Say I want to store the string somewhere for a while,like the session. Is the password also stored with it? (which would seem very strange?). And no, I'm not planning on using 'secret-key' or any similar hack as a password.

I am planning on dynamically generating a class variable @@password using a uuid, which I don't store other than in memory, and can change from one running of the program to the next.

Symmetric:

>> password = 'shhhh'
 => "shhhh"
 >> crypted_password = password.encrypt(:symmetric, :password => 'secret_key')
 => "qSg8vOo6QfU=\n"
  >> crypted_password.class
 => String
 >> crypted_password == 'shhhh'
 => true
 >> password = crypted_password.decrypt
 => "shhhh"