Solved the cipher on the main page of The Pirate Bay

As you know, The Pirate Bay has to migrate from url to url from ip to ip due to persecution of copyright holders. More recently, the tracker worked on the Swedish domain. After the resource was suddenly unavailable, and some time later a countdown timer appeared on the main one (the countdown will end on February 1 ), an animated skull pattern with bones and a certain text line, in which many recognized the AES-cipher.

For a whole month, they tried to decipher this line, and after some prompts from the team, we still managed to do it.

Here is the same cipher (file aes.png ):
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The reddit dafky2000 user deciphered the puzzle.

When decrypting, he used the source code of the page, where he saw html-tags, which, in principle, had no meaning. For example, 'key lowercase', the tag that surrounds the text "WeAreTPB". The encryption standard turned out to be AES - here the hint was hidden in the name of the picture with the cipher.

The encryption key is the first 128 bits of the SHA-256 hash from the string “wearetpb”. Well, decoding is a video from YouTube, cutting “I'll be back” from Arnold Schwarzenegger. Plus in decoding there is also the phrase “I'll be back.” Who exactly will return, and what we will see on February 1 at the current location of the resource, is unclear.

If anyone wants to repeat the steps covered by dafky2000, then here is the code:

echo "JyO7wNzc8xht47QKWohfDVj6Sc2qH + X5tBCT + uetocIJcjQnp / 2f1ViEBR + ty0Cz" | openssl aes-128-cbc -K $ (printf wearetpb | sha256sum | head -c 32 | tr '[: lower:]' '[: upper:]') -nosalt -nopad -iv 0 -base64 -d -p