Sharing An Encryption Certificate Between Servers

Hello,

We have a couple of databases set up, and we replicate data from certain tables between the two database. One of the tables we replicate is the Users table, in which we'd like to encrypt user passwords. Initially I created a certificate on both servers, and found that I could not DecryptByCert a password that was encrypted on the other server, and vice versa. It looks like all I was forgetting to do with supply a 'ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = ' parameter to CREATE CERTIFICATE. So, now I have the following:

CREATE CERTIFICATE Cert_UserPassword
ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD = 'pGFD4bb925DGvbd2439587y'
WITH SUBJECT ='TestingCertificate'

I ran that query on both of our servers, and I find I am able to decrypt the password on both servers. So, as far as I can tell, this is exactly the way I want it to work.

So, now for the question: Is this the right way to go about it? In order to decrypt the password on either server, it means I need to pass the 'pGFD4bb925DGvbd2439587y' password to the DecryptByCert command, which doesn't seem very secure. But if I don't use the 'ENCRYPTION BY PASSWORD', then the cert will be signed by the Master key, which is different on both servers, which will result in a certificate that can't decrypt what was encrypted on the other server.

Is there a way to take the actual certificate on one server, and export it to the other server, so that they're both using the exact same certificate to encrypt and decrypt? I would like to not have the password included in the Decryption command, if I can help it.

Thanks.

-Dan