Well, I was playing about with this in work today and couldn’t replicate the fault. So, I just checked my model and I had a beforeSave changing the variable to base64_encode hence it not working as expected! silly me.
Now that is sorted, is there a way to change cipher/mode etc? what is the default cipher/mode for this class?
comment the if your table is not utf8, comment the line from your config that sets charset to utf8. also make sure the field length in your table is large enough to store the encrypted value.
I remember experiencing the same problem a while back.