This is a list of important publications in cryptography, organized by field. Some reasons why a particular publication might be regarded as important:
Topic creator - A publication that created a new topic
Description: Almost nothing had been published in cryptography in several decades and very few non-government researchers were thinking about it. The Codebreakers, a popular and non academic book, made many more people aware and contains a lot of technical information, although it requires careful reading to extract it. Its 1967 appearance was followed by the appearance of many papers over the next few years.
Differential Cryptanalysis of DES-like Cryptosystems
Description: Information theory based analysis of cryptography. The original form of this paper was a confidential Bell Labs report from 1945, not the one published.
Description: The paper provides a rigorous basis to encryption and shows that it possible to equate the slightest cryptanalysis to solve a pure math problem. Second, it introduces the notion of computational indistinguishability.
Proofs that Yield Nothing But their Validity or All Languages in NP have Zero-Knowledge Proofs
Description: This paper explains how to construct a zero-knowledge proof system for any language in NP.
Description: Feistel ciphers are a form of cipher of which DES is the most important. It would be hard to overestimate the importance of either Feistel or DES. Feistel pushed a transition from stream ciphers to block ciphers. Although most ciphers operate on streams, most of the important ciphers today are block ciphers at their core.
Description: DES is not only one of the most widely deployed ciphers in the world but has had a profound impact on the development of cryptography. Roughly a generation of cryptographers devoted much of their time to attacking and improving DES.
Description: This paper suggested public key cryptography and presented Diffie–Hellman key exchange. For more information about this work see: W.Diffie, M.E.Hellman, , in Proc. IEEE, Vol 67 Mar 1979, pp 397–427.
Description: In this paper, Kohnfelder introduced certificates which are the heart of all modernkey management systems.
Secure Communications Over Insecure Channels
Description: This paper introduced a branch of public key cryptography, known as public key distribution systems. Merkle's work predated "New directions in cryptography" though it was published after it. The Diffie–Hellman key exchange is an implementation of such a Merkle system. Hellman himself has argued that a more correct name would be Diffie–Hellman–Merkle key exchange.
A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public Key Cryptosystems
Description: The RSA encryption method. The first public-key encryption method.
How to Share a Secret
Description: A safe method for sharing a secret.
On the security of public key protocols
Description: Introduced the adversarial model against which almost all cryptographic protocols are judged.
Using encryption for authentication in large networks of computers
Description: This paper introduced the basic ideas of cryptographic protocols and showed how both secret-key and public-key encryption could be used to achieve authentication.
Description: The Kerberos authentication protocol, which allows individuals communicating over an insecure network to prove their identity to one another in a secure and practical manner.
