Trouble with encode + encrypt + pad using same code for python2 and python3

Question

Disclaimer: I understand that the following is not suited to give "security" in a production environment. It is simply meant as "a little bit

Answer 1

More of an addendum: as result of the answers I got; and digging into AES encryption a bit deeper I figured that the Cipher AES API actually allows for "unpadded" input. I rewrote my code to:

from __future__ import print_function
from Crypto.Cipher import AES
from Crypto.Util import Counter

from base64 import b64decode, b64encode

def scramble(data):
    crypto = AES.new('This is a key123', AES.MODE_CTR, 'This is an IV456', counter=Counter.new(128))
    return b64encode(crypto.encrypt(data))


def unscramble(data):
    crypto = AES.new('This is a key123', AES.MODE_CTR, 'This is an IV456', counter=Counter.new(128))
    return crypto.decrypt(b64decode(data))


incoming = "123456801DEF"
print("in: {}".format(incoming))
scrambled = scramble(incoming)
print("scrambled: {}".format(scrambled))
andback = unscramble(scrambled)
print("reversed : {}".format(andback))

And now I receive the expected results!

The trick is that I can't reuse the AES object; so a new one needs to be created; and in addition to that AES also offers the CTR mode - and that one does padding internally!