awesome-crypto-papers

Or why cryptography shouldn't be backdoored, by a all-star committee of crypto researches from around the world

By Gary C. Kessler

By Needham, Schroeder: this is were crypto-based auth starts

Fundamental cryptography paper by Claude Shannon

Inquiries into formalism and naive intuition behind security proofs, by Neal Koblitz et al

Introductory paper on NaCl, discussing important aspects of implementing cryptography and using it as a larger building block in security systems, by Daniel J. Bernstein, Tanja Lange, Peter Schwabe

The Keyed-Hash Message Authentication Code FIPS document

SHA-3 Standard: Permutation-Based Hash and Extendable-Output Functions

The best simple explanation of math behind

Security analysis of different legacy HMAC schemes by Jongsung Kim et al

Security of randomized CBC-MACs and a new construction that resists birthday paradox attacks and provably reaches full security, by E. Jaulmes et al

AES FIPS document

Maintained by NIST

If stuff above was a bit hard or you're looking for a good laugh

Example of designing great practical attack on cipher implementation, by Daniel J. Bernstein

Side channel attacks on AES, another view, by Dag Arne Osvik, Adi Shamir and Eran Tromer

Broad explanation of Salsa20 security cipher by Daniel J. Bernstein

Analysis of Salsa20 family of ciphers, by Jean-Philippe Aumasson et al

IETF Draft of ciphersuite family, by Adam Langley et al

Original Rijndael proposal by Joan Daemen and Vincent Rijmen

Overview of ongoing research in secret key crypto and hashes by ECRYPT Network of Excellence in Cryptology

Original paper introducing GCM, by by David A. McGrew and John Viega

Design, analysis and security of GCM, and, more specifically, AES GCM mode, by David A. McGrew and John Viega

An analysis and algorithm for nonce generation for AES GCM with higher counter-collision probability, by Yuichi Niwa, Keisuke Ohashi, Kazuhiko Minematsu, Tetsu Iwata

An overview of existing searchable encryption schemes, and analysis of scheme built on AES-GCM, blind index and bloom filter by Eugene Pilyankevich, Dmytro Kornieiev, Artem Storozhuk

Old but gold mathematical proof that the set of DES permutations (encryption and decryption for each DES key) is not closed under functional composition. That means that multiple DES encryption is not equivalent to single DES encryption and means that the size of the subgroup generated by the set of DES permutations is greater than 10^2499, which is too large for potential attacks on DES, which would exploit a small subgroup

A great example of stream cipher cryptanalysis, by Yukiyasu Tsunoo et al

Applying slide attacks (typical cryptanalysis technique for block ciphers) to hash functions, M. Gorski et al

Attempt to organize the existing literature of block-cipher cryptanalysis in a way that students can use to learn cryptanalytic techniques and ways to break new algorithms, by Bruce Schneier

By Pascal Junod

By Elad Pinhas Barkan

Analysis of number of rounds for symmetric cryptography primitives, and suggestions to do fewer rounds, by Jean-Philippe Aumasson

A 2005 paper about modular differential collision attack on MD5, MD4 and other hash functions, by Xiaoyun Wang and Hongbo Yu

A 2012 paper about using the combination of differential and algebraic techniques for collision attacks on SHA-3, by Itai Dinur, Orr Dunkelman, Adi Shamir

An attack ("Reflection-Meet-inthe-Middle Attack") on GOST block cipher that allows to recover key with 2^225 computations and 2^32 known plaintexts, by Takanori Isobe

A beginner-friendly paper explaining and demonstrating techniques for linear and differential cryptanalysis

Proof-of-concept versions of attacks on MEGA data storage. Showcasing their practicality and exploitability.

Seminal paper by Diffie and Hellman, introducing public key cryptography and key exchange/agreement protocol

An explanation of the Diffie-Hellman methon in more engineering terms

Original paper introducing RSA algorithm

Rather education explanation of every bit behind RSA

Paper by R. Merkle, predated "New directions in cryptography" though it was published after it. The Diffie-Hellman key exchange is an implementation of such a Merkle system

Dolev-Yao model is a formal model, used to prove properties of interactive cryptographic protocols

How to Share a Secret

A safe method for sharing secrets

Great inquiry into attacking RSA and it's internals, by Dan Boneh

An example in attacking practical crypto implementationby D. Boneh, D. Brumley

by K. Bentahar

History and classification of the PAKE algorithms

Collection of implementation mistakes which lead to exploits of assymetric cryptography

EdDSA explained with ease and elegance

Historic inquiry into development of ECC and it's adoption

Fine example of building up ECC from scratch

For many elliptic curve representation forms

Paper on Curve25519

Pracitcal example of implementing elliptic curve crypto, by M. Brown et al

Seminal paper on EdDSA signatures on ed25519 curve by Daniel J. Bernstein et al

Official NIST guide how securely implement elliptic curves. It also includes math shortcuts, optimizations and possible security risk of wrong algorithm implementation

Computing private keys by analyzing and exploiting biases in ECDSA nonces

Exploiting timing/bit-length leaks for recovering private keys from ECDSA signatures

Breaking 160-bit curve ECDSA using less than one bit leakage

A pair of papers which investigate the notions of proof of knowledge and proof of computational ability, M. Bellare and O. Goldreich

Classic paper by Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson

By Goldreich, Micali and Wigderson, a relative to the above

By Manuel Blum

Brassau et al

Knowledge complexity of interactive proof systems

By GoldWasser, Micali and Rackoff. Defining computational complexity of "knowledge" within zero knowledge proofs

Great intro on original ZKP protocols

A good intro into Zero knowledge protocols

Construction of non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs using lattice-based preprocessing models, by Sam Kim and David J. Wu

Methodologically very relevant document on goals and procedures of key management

Classic paper from 1999 with guidelines for the determination of key sizes for symmetric cryptosystems, RSA, ECC, by Arjen K. Lenstra and Eric R. Verheul

Unconditional deterministic polynomial-time algorithm that determines whether an input number is prime or composite

These lectures describe Kyber (ML-KEM) and Dilithium (ML-DSA), the quantum-safe lattice-based key encapsulation and signature schemes that were standardized in August 2024 by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)

Brief observation of mathematical tasks that can be used to build cryptosystems secure against attacks by post-quantum computers

Introduction to post-quantum cryptography

Daniel Bernshtein's insight how to save RSA in post-quantum period

The Oil and Vinegar signature scheme, proposed in 1997 by Patarin, is one of the oldest and best-understood multivariate quadratic signature schemes. It has excellent performance and signature sizes. This paper is about enhancing this algorithm in usage in the post-quantum era.

By Dan Boneh and Victor Shoup. A well-balanced introductory course into cryptography, a bit of cryptanalysis and cryptography-related security

Broad overview of design and cryptanalysis of various ciphers and hash functions, by Bart Van Rompay

Predominantly mathematically oriented information on learning, using and experimenting cryptographic procedures

By Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone. Good classical introduction into cryptography and ciphers

By Mike Rosulek. A lot of basic stuff covered really well. No ECC

By Victor Shoup, excellent starters book on math universally used in cryptography

Textbook, great lectures and problems to solve

Crypto 101 is an introductory course on cryptography, freely available for programmers of all ages and skill levels

Lecture notes by Rafael Pass, Abhi Shelat

Famous set of lectures on cryptography by Shafi Goldwasser (MIT), M. Bellare (University of California)

Video course by Christof Paar (University of Bochum in Germany). In english

Stanford University course on Coursera, taught by prof. Dan Boneh. is still in development