I'm a little lost, perhaps I'm not explaining my problem too well. I really appreciate your assistance so far, and I'll try not to waste too much more of your time or space in the HN databases.

If you have a quick link about your first paragraph, that would be appreciated. I'm not sure exactly what that means -- I understand what you mean bygenerate an AES key via /dev/random (gives us nondeterministic key), then encrypt the data with AES. However, why would I use a symmetric encryption system rather than a private/public key pair? With a priv/pub pair, can't I encrypt the data on the server but not be able to decrypt it?

Again, thanks for your help. I'm not actually storing passwords -- those I properly hash. The problem is that my data app has a requirement to collect SSNs (and they need to be reversible, although that can be offline at a later date). Oddly enough, the data requirements only state encryption is required for that -- most of my colleagues are using symmetric encryption with the passphrase stored on the server itself! I was just hoping I could build a system that would be able to encrypt the data, but not decrypt it (the decryption would be handled by another machine not available to the public).