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active_record_encryption

🛡️ Use Active Record Encryption (Rails 7+)​

Rails 7 ships with built‑in model‐level encryption. After setting config.active_record.encryption.primary_key (in credentials or env vars), simply declare encrypted attributes:

# app/models/user.rb
class User < ApplicationRecord
  encrypts :ssn
end

Run a migration to store encrypted data (types :binary):

class AddEncryptedSsnToUsers < ActiveRecord::Migration[7.0]
  def change
    add_column :users, :encrypted_ssn, :binary
  end
end

Now Rails will automatically encrypt on write and decrypt on read:

user = User.create!(ssn: '123-45-6789')
user.encrypted_ssn           # => 0xAFB34D...
user.ssn                     # => "123-45-6789"