This is a list of important publications in cryptography, organized by field.
Some reasons why a particular publication might be regarded as important:
Description: Presented the index of coincidence method for codebreaking.
Description: The breaking of the Enigma.
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: 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 not 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.
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, "Privacy and Authentication: An Introduction to Cryptography", in Proc. IEEE, Vol 67(3) Mar 1979, pp 397–427.
Description: In this paper (along with Loren M. Kohnfelder,"Using Certificates for Key Distribution in a Public-Key Cryptosystem", MIT Technical report 19 May 1978), Kohnfelder introduced certificates (signed messages containing public keys) which are the heart of all modern key management systems.
Description: This paper introduced a branch public key cryptography, known as public key distribution systems. Merkle 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[1] that the more correct name would be Diffie-Hellman-Merkle key exchange.
Description: The RSA encryption method. The first public key encryption method.
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: A safe method for sharing a secret.
Description: Introduced the adversarial model against which almost all cryptographic protocols are judged.
Description: The paper provides a rigorous basis to encryption (e.g., partial information) and shows that it possible to equate the slightest cryptanalysis to solve a pure math problem. Second, it introduces the notion of computational indistinguishability.
Description: This paper explains how to construct a zero-knowledge proof system for any language in NP.
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.
Description: The method of Differential cryptanalysis.
Description: The method of Linear cryptanalysis.
Description: Network software in distributed systems.