[Rails] Given the session key and secret, how can we decrypt cookie-based sessions?

Hello all. I've got a question about how Rails handles cookie
encryption/decryption.

I've got this in my config/environment.rb

config.action_controller.session = {
:session_key => [some key],
:secret => [some secret]
}

And this in config/environment/production.rb et al.:

ActionController::Base.session_options[:session_domain] = [some
domain]

So far, so good -- as long as all my Rails apps have the same
session_key and secret, and are on the same domain, they can all use
that same cookie.

However, a colleague now has a JSP application (on the same domain),
with which he'd like to read the cookies I have set.

So, given a secret and an encrypted cookie value, how would we decrypt
it to get the contents of that cookie?

(The docs seem to indicate this is one-way SHA1 encryption by default
-- http://caboo.se/doc/classes/CGI/Session/CookieStore.html -- but
then how would my Rails applications read the contents of a cookie
that is one-way encrypted?)

Thanks in advance for any tips/pointers/insight,
Joe

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