Android Studio. Building signed APK. Get Key Failed

Question

I've been building release versions of my app for months, and now all of a sudden I get this error.
Failed to read key ******** from store ***** Get Key Failed. Given final block not properly padded. Such issues can arise if a bad key is used during decryption.
This is beyond frustrating.

What I've done so far

1. Read every post on this error and tried every solution
2. Verified my passwords are correct
3. Checked and unchecked "save passwords"
4. Verified my keystore location is correct

Answer 1

If you get error like block not properly padded, bad key or PKCS12 when signing the App Bundle or APK, try using the same password for the key and the keystore file, it works for me.

Answer 2

Recently, Android Studio started to show a message: "Warning: Different store and key passwords not supported for PKCS12 KeyStores. Ignoring user-specified -keypass value. in Android Studio" - so, first of all, store and key passwords should be the same, like other people said.

Besides, after getting this error even using the same password, I realized that we can't use characters like @ or $ on the passwords.