I have a small app that needs to store a passport number in a database (MySQL). I'd like to encrypt the passport for security, so I'm using ezPyCrypto. I've never had to encrypt data before so I'm a bit new at this. However, I've worked through a shell and successfully encrypted and decrypted a string. Applying the same logic in my model to my passport string, I get the following error when attempting to save:

UnicodeDecodeError at /register/ 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xb4 in position 0: ordinal not in range(128)

For reference, here is the save portion of the model:

def save(self): key = ezPyCrypto.key(512) self.passport = key.encString(self.passport)

I searched for the above error and it seems to be a known bug with newforms (which I'm using). I couldn't find a clear answer to how to work around the problem or if patch has been released.

Unrelated to the error:

Can I simply store a single generated key in my app or must I generate a unique key for each saved object and write the key to a file in a non-public directory? I realize there are different levels of accepted security, but because of the size and scale of this app I'd like to keep things simple if possible. Any advice here would be appreciated.