Sorry about the lousy description earlier. Here's the situation:

I have a server that encrypts plaintext based on the request it receives(plaintext, algorithm, keyname etc.). I can add databases configurations to the server, and also choose specific columns in a table to be encrypted by the server. Once I select a table to be encrypted with a given key/algorithm, the server encrypts all the contents of the column and creates a new table on the database with the encrypted data.

Now I want to verify if the encryption was indeed correct. So I extract the encrypted data from the new table (using perl and DBI), and send a decrypt request to the server with all the relevant info(key, algorithm etc.). If the resulting plaintext matches that in the original table, I know that the server's encryption is correct.

So the problem I am facing is - Do I need to transform the data extracted from the encrypted column before sending it to the server for decryption? I hope makes my question clear. Thanks for your help!

linuxfan