What is your favourite crypto related paper?

Some of my old favourites:

• New Directions in Cryptography (come on, best crypto paper ever written!)
• Twenty years of attacks on the RSA cryptosystem (always love survey papers, and when Dan Boneh is writing, you know it's going to be good!)
• Differential Cryptanalysis of DES-like Cryptosystems (not only a new technique, but we also learn that the mysterious DES has s-boxes that make sense for security, dispelling some myths about a possible backdoor)
• The Number Field Sieve
• Factoring integers with the number field sieve
• The factorization of the ninth Fermat number (greatest factoring result ever in my opinion, based upon what they factored and the introduction of a new technique motivated for the purpose of factoring that number)
• Factoring by electronic mail (hey, everybody is doing scientific distributed computing these days, but this is where it all started folks)
• Identity-based encryption from the Weil pairing (a new tool, solving a long open problem)
• How to Share a Secret (very short paper yet very very significant)
• An Application of the Theory of Permutations in Breaking the Enigma Cipher (awesome history, cute mathematics)
• Solving low-density subset sum problems (There is a long history in trying to get efficient public key cryptosystem based on subset sums and/or lattices, and this is where LLL first starts smashing these attempts)
• AES proposal: Rijndael (hey, a block cipher where they can prove resistance to differential and linear cryptanalysis, thank you for lifting the science)
• Differential power analysis (the ultimate side channel attack)

That...that one you can print on...

I'll, myself walk out.

Merkle, 1974: First ever thoughts on Public Key Cryptography:

http://www.merkle.com/1974/FirstCS244projectProposal.pdf

Not completely true crypto, but the Bitcoin paper was certainly fascinating.

The one's Alan Turing did at Cambridge