TUF keys are hardcoded openssl keys
PyCrypto appears to be pure python, i apologize for the confusion. Reading the source, It looks like they've hacked together an implementation for OpenSSL's non-standardized encrypted private key format, and for unencrypted PKCS#8, but not for encrypted PKCS#8. Sounds like this might be a fix worth offering to pycrypto.
Or change TUF to use pycryptopp as the rest of bitmask.
(from redmine: created on 2014-07-11, relates #5883 (closed))