You haven't read Diffie&Hellman, the paper that invented public key cryptography? Chaum's ACM paper? Ken Thompson's infamous ACM lecture, on invisibly backdooring the Unix login?

Having said that, I think the list is poorly chosen and inconsistently presented. Do they really want Rivest on micropayments but leave off RSA???

I am not sure I've read any of them directly. I've read Chaum's Scientific American article, which was I thought pretty influentual, in that it was the starting point for the last decade of work that I did...

I'm certainly aware of the Ken Thompson backdooring, but really, how relevant is that? As a display of the limits of security, sure, but oh so esoteric! If anything, it's a demonstration that if that's all we have to worry about, that's good news.

(I was also confused by the choice of the paper on micropayments. I'm trying to think of an important paper on payments and so forth, and I can't ... most of the action was done by people who wouldn't publish their results as they were hoping to patent up and strike it rich.)

Hey Ian,

I'm no listkeeper. It is a list we have collected to choose from when giving 18 papers to students in a seminar. Every member of the lab contributed some papers - ac can bee quite easily seen in the different quotation stiles.

But I agree with you: who contributes a paper to such a list should also contribute a link.