some important papers

This is an (under-development) cryptography glossary that I am working on. In the past I’ve had a great deal of difficulty finding important or classical papers whenever I want them, so this is a series of links that lead to some important papers worth reading, sorted by category.

my notes

A Note on Black-Box Separations and Key Agreement from OWFs, an exposition on Impaliazzo and Rudich’s 1989 result separating key agreement from one-way permutations.
Notes on Finite Fields, a brief primer on finite fields.
Notes on O-Notation, a short note I wrote on O-notation in undergrad.

assumptions

The Decision Diffie-Hellman Problem, (1998), Boneh. A survey on DDH.
Public-Key Cryptosystems Based on Composite Degree Residuosity Classes, (1999), Paillier. Introduced DCR and variants.

foundations

New Directions in Cryptography, (1976), Diffie and Hellman. Introduced Public-Key Cryptography.
The Knowledge Complexity of Interactive Proof-Systems, (1985), Goldwasser, Micali and Rackoff. Introduced interactive proofs and zero-knowledge.
The random oracle methodology, revisited, (1998), Canetti, Goldreich, Halevi. Constructs a scheme that is secure in the ROM but insecure when it is replaced with any hash function.
How to go beyond the black-box simulation barrier, (2001), Barak. The first non-black-box technique for constructing a zero-knowledge proof simulator, constructs a concurrent zero-knowledge proof system.
On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs, (2001), Barak, Goldreich, Impagliazzo, Rudich, Sahai, Vadhan, Yang. Shows the impossibility of software obfuscation.

encryption

Design and Analysis of Practical Public-Key Encryption Schemes Secure against Adaptive Chosen Ciphertext Attack, (2001), Cramer, Shoup. A CCA-Secure Encryption Scheme based on DDH.
Circular and Leakage Resilient Public-Key Encryption Under Subgroup Indistinguishability (or: Quadratic Residuosity Strikes Back), (2010), Brakerski, Goldwasser. A provably KDM-secure encryption scheme from QR, DCR and related assumptions.