Original PayBreak project poster created by the research team, published April 2017. Source: PayBreak GitHub repository.

In April 2017, before most of the world had ever heard of EternalBlue or ransomware kill switches, a group of researchers quietly released a solution to a problem that hadn’t fully erupted yet. The team—Eugene Kolodenker, William Koch, Gianluca Stringhini, and Manuel Egele—published a paper and open-sourced a prototype called PayBreak. Just weeks later, WannaCry would tear across the globe, encrypting hundreds of thousands of machines, crippling hospitals, and sending IT teams into full panic mode.

But PayBreak already had the answer. And eight years later, it still holds lessons we haven’t fully absorbed.

PayBreak is one of the most practical and important academic contributions to ransomware defense. Its value isn’t just in its novelty, but in its accessibility. It took an advanced concept—intercepting cryptographic key generation in real time—and turned it into something usable. Not just to fellow researchers, but to engineers, defenders, and yes, even potential product developers.

Most security research doesn’t work this way. And maybe it doesn’t have to. Novelty for its own sake is often what pushes the field forward. Some ideas are best left as proofs of concept, waiting for the world to catch up. But in software engineering, where ideas can live and die on the clarity of their implementation, there’s a difference between saying, “this is theoretically possible,” and showing, “here’s how you do it, today.”

PayBreak did the latter.

At the time, ransomware defense was still rooted in either reactive recovery (via backups) or post-infection analysis (e.g., trying to reverse-engineer encryption schemes or hope for weak key reuse). But PayBreak offered a new approach. It monitored the system during execution, capturing the symmetric encryption keys before ransomware had the chance to lock the files. Rather than fighting encryption with decryption, PayBreak sidestepped the challenge entirely by grabbing the key material at the moment it was generated.

This matters because the majority of crypto-ransomware families rely on hybrid encryption. That means a unique symmetric key is generated for each file or session on the victim’s machine, then encrypted with the attacker’s public key. Once those symmetric keys are deleted, the files are effectively lost unless you pay the ransom or find a flaw in the implementation.

What PayBreak did was simple, in concept: hook into cryptographic API calls (like CryptGenRandom), extract the session keys being generated, encrypt them with the victim’s own public key, and store them locally. If ransomware struck, the user could retrieve those stored keys and decrypt their files without ever needing the attacker’s cooperation.

That idea—intercepting key generation ahead of time—had probably been floating around in pieces. But the PayBreak team operationalized it. They released the source code. They published benchmarks. They tested it on real ransomware families and showed exactly how it worked. This was more than an academic contribution. It was the open-sourcing of encryption key capture.

That phrase deserves emphasis. PayBreak was, in essence, the first practical open-source implementation of proactive key material interception. It wasn’t just a clever workaround. It redefined where defenders could intervene.

And perhaps more importantly, it redefined who could get involved. Because they shared their work openly, others could build on it. Defenders could adapt it. Engineers could imagine product possibilities. Suddenly, the idea that ransomware could be thwarted without backups, without decrypting locked files, started to feel real.

This is what accessibility in research looks like. Not just well-written papers, but runnable code. Not just test results, but implementation details. Not just abstract novelty, but practical usability. And that accessibility is what makes PayBreak feel so different, even now.

It also stands in contrast to how many defense solutions are still framed. Even today, much of the conversation around ransomware focuses on damage control. Backup and restore. Immutable storage. Offline vaults. These are all important. But they’re responses, not preemption. PayBreak planted a seed that defense could begin earlier. That entropy sources and session key generation could become defensive terrain.

From a product standpoint, that seed sprouted. The PayBreak project likely triggered more than a few light bulbs. What if there was a way to turn this idea into a lightweight agent? What if defenders could preempt ransomware, not just survive it? What if backup wasn’t the only answer?

We now see the emergence of products and platforms that capture key material, monitor memory, or insert deception at the cryptographic level. That lineage traces back, in part, to PayBreak.

But despite its importance, PayBreak still feels under-celebrated. It remains an academic paper cited in other academic papers, remembered by a niche slice of the cybersecurity community. Maybe that’s the nature of research. Maybe it speaks to how short our collective memory is when it comes to defense innovation.

Or maybe it’s a reminder that the most forward-thinking solutions don’t always come from vendors with glossy product demos. Sometimes, they come from a research team that saw a problem coming and decided to solve it before the world even realized it had one.

Eight years ago, PayBreak quietly gave us a way to recover encrypted files without paying a ransom. It’s time we make a little more noise about it.

Arms Cyber’s own approach to encryption key capture is available as part of the Arms Community Edition (ACE). Free to download and designed to make ransomware defense more accessible. You can get started here or explore the tooling on our GitHub repository.

For organizations seeking comprehensive protection, our full ransomware defense platform includes automated moving target defense, zero trust data access, deception technology, and rapid recovery capabilities designed to preempt, block, and remediate ransomware threats. Learn more or request a demo to see Arms Cyber in action.