An example I am working on to use openssl via subprocess from Python

open_ssl_from_python

#!/usr/bin/env python
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
"""
Simple example of calling openSSL from python. Also with base64 set since I 
will want to store in a text file
"""
from __future__ import print_function, unicode_literals

import subprocess
import shlex

textin = u'can you see me? What about Ûńįç°dė'

def encrypt(data,password):
    cmd = u'openssl des3 -salt -base64 -pass pass:' + password
    
    # Encode it to bytes
    # cmd = cmd.encode('utf8')
    
    proc = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(cmd),
                stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
                stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    
    out,err = proc.communicate(data)
    return out

def decrypt(encrypted,password):
    cmd = u'openssl des3 -d -salt -base64 -pass pass:' + password
    
    # Encode it to bytes
    # cmd = cmd.encode('utf8')
    
    proc = subprocess.Popen(shlex.split(cmd),
                stdin=subprocess.PIPE,
                stdout=subprocess.PIPE,
                stderr=subprocess.PIPE)
    
    out,err = proc.communicate(encrypted)
    return out


    
udata = textin.encode('utf8')
password='1234'

edata = encrypt(udata,password)

# Just for example if storing/writing to a text file
etext = edata.decode('ascii') 
edata  = etext.encode('ascii')

ddata = decrypt(edata,password)

textout = ddata.decode('utf8')

print('textin:',textin)
print('udata:',udata)
print('edata:',edata)
print('ddata:',ddata)
print('textout:',textout)
print('textin == textout:',textin == textout)

Updated this to send the data via communicate()