Why don't PyCrypto and M2Crypto produce the same result as OpenSSL here (AES-128 ECB)

Question

If I run the following, for openSSL:

echo -n "0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef" | openssl aes-128-ecb -nosalt -nopad | xxd

and enter the key "YELLOW SUBMARINE", I get the following ciphertext:

a2a5 8316 129f c596 8341 c78a 0c36 5d20
a2a5 8316 129f c596 8341 c78a 0c36 5d20

Yet in PyCrypto, the following code:

from Crypto.Cipher import AES
key = b'YELLOW SUBMARINE'
cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_ECB, "")
msg =  cipher.encrypt(b'0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef')

Outputs:

20 1e 80 2f 7b 6a ce 6f 6c d0 a7 43 ba 78 ae ad
20 1e 80 2f 7b 6a ce 6f 6c d0 a7 43 ba 78 ae ad

(line breaks added for clarity)

What is the cause of this discrepancy? Both are 128-bit AES in ECB mode. PyCrypto doesn't appear to be salting, and padding should be unnecessary in any case with this plaintext.

P.S. The same thing happens with M2Crypto:

import M2Crypto
cipher=M2Crypto.EVP.Cipher('aes_128_ecb',b'YELLOW SUBMARINE',"", op=1,
padding=0, salt=None)
out=b''
plaintext=b'0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef'
out=out+cipher.update(plaintext)
print ' '.join(x.encode('hex') for x in out)

Outputs:

20 1e 80 2f 7b 6a ce 6f 6c d0 a7 43 ba 78 ae ad
20 1e 80 2f 7b 6a ce 6f 6c d0 a7 43 ba 78 ae ad

Answer 1

Commandline openssl enc normally does Password Based Encryption which derives the actual key, and IV (although IV is ignored for ECB), from the password or passphrase you enter, using a variant of PBKDF1. To get "raw" encryption you must specify the key in hex with -K (uppercase), in which case -nosalt is irrelevant (because it applies only to PBKDF). Except for the most recent releases of OpenSSL (and my test system has an older one) with -K you must also specify an -iv in hex even when the cipher/mode used doesn't need it, like ECB.

lin04:~ $ echo -n YELLOW SUBMARINE |od -tx1 |awk '$1="";gsub(/ /,"")' 59454c4c4f57205355424d4152494e45 lin04:~ $ echo -n 0123456789abcdef |openssl aes-128-ecb -nopad \ -K 59454c4c4f57205355424d4152494e45 -iv 00 |od -tx1 0000000 20 1e 80 2f 7b 6a ce 6f 6c d0 a7 43 ba 78 ae ad 0000020

Out of scope of your question, but I hope you know that using ECB is in most cases a very bad idea. I've seen probably dozens of questions and answers here and security.SE about that. As the most glaring fairly recent example, see the Adobe password breach, which allowed many many passwords to be broken due to using ECB.