The above 7.55 beta changes are looking good now for CBC.

For ECB mode I noticed that 'er' and 'ei' should probably be invalid switch combos like 'es' is, instead of being silently ignored.

Also, for documenting the ECB behavior for future searchers, key lengths 1-56 remain identical with/without the 'l' switch. While 'el' now invalidates keys longer than 56 bytes, dropping the 'l' switch now reverts to pre v7.52 behavior of silently chopping ECB keys at 72 bytes, as shown by the following example with/without the 'l' switch.

If wanting to preserve support for the non-l literal 57-72 byte ECB keys, ECB mode without the 'l' switch should at least be reporting an error if the key parm is longer than 72, since the non-literal ECB key isn't an unlimited string being filtered through MD5.

Code:
//var %i 55 | while (%i isnum 1-73) { echo -a %i $encode(message,em,$left($str(abcde,20),%i)) | inc %i }