Openssl_decrypt returns empty output - php

Question

Hello everyone i was trying to decrypt some encrypted strings i encrypted with python .
the problem is that sometimes it decrypts correctly and sometimes it gives empty output for no obvious reason and i couldn't find any solution for it.
here's the code i'm using to decrypt on PHP .
knowing that online AES decryption tools decrypts it correctly.
$rtk=base64_decode('zgdHfETipvp1E5m3ix5NFOLuX8N0+zAIBzg+GOq0cTQ=');
$method = "aes-128-ecb";
$key = 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa';
$email=openssl_decrypt($rtk, $method, $key,OPENSSL_RAW_DATA);
i would apreciate your help !
EDIT :
The python code i used to encript the string :
import pandas as pd
from Crypto.Cipher import AES
import names
import urllib.parse
import base64
from Crypto.Util.Padding import pad
from Crypto.Util.Padding import unpad
email="zqeafzeqaf23#example1.com"
key = b'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'
data = email.encode('ascii', 'ignore')
cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_ECB)
b64string = base64.urlsafe_b64encode(cipher.encrypt(pad(data,16)))
print(b64string)

Answer 1

Your Python code uses urlsafe_b64encode, but your PHP code uses the normal base64 variant (in fact your example data in the PHP code contains a + character so couldn’t have been produced by that Python code).
This could explain why the decryption is failing. If the url safe base 64 output from Python contains a - or _ character, PHP will simply strip that character from the string before decoding the rest of it. This will leave a string that is not a multiple of the AES block length and the decryption will fail.
You should ensure you are using the same base 64 variant to encode and decode. It doesn’t look like PHP provides a URL safe variant, you might need to use something like strtr before decoding to convert the base 64 into a normal variant:
$data = strtr($data, '-_', '+/');
$decoded = base64_decode($data);