Decrypting in Python an string encrypted using .NET

Question

I am trying to encrypt a string using C# and decrypt it using Python. The encryption/decryption part works as expected (i.e. I am able to decrypt the string I originally encrypt

Answer 1

The string is encoded to bytes using the UTF-16 encoding. The first two bytes are a BOM. Then each character is encoded to two bytes.

From the documentation for Encoding.Unicode:

Gets an encoding for the UTF-16 format using the little endian byte order.

To get the original string you need to decode it back from UTF-16 bytes to a Unicode string.

print aes.decrypt(text).decode('utf-16')