The body of literature around cryptographic techniques and provable security is enormous. To help newcomers approach the community I am collecting a list of nice papers that hopefully provide an easy introduction to the main branches of cryptography and the way formal reasoning works.

This is THE Diffie Hellman paper, the stepping stone into public-key and computational cryptography. A must read for every cryptographer, at least once in a lifetime (and every now and then, as a reminder that simple explanations are possible, good and long-standing)

The best introduction to the field of multi-variate quadratic-polynomial based cryptography. Neat mathematical expositions, didactic presentation, great way to motivate the introduction of new assumptions in the field.

Extremely clear paper, that combines secure protocols, tweaks to basic cryptographic tools and lots of nice combinatorics (probability theory) to prove a very neat result about how to securely select a set of parties to which one should pass on (shares of) a secret (evolvoing committee proactive secret sharing).

Amazingly written paper setting limitations and implications of functional encryption (the gap between game-base and simulation-based security definitions) in a clear and intuitive way.

This is a great paper to understand how to reason about and formalize security notions around anonymity in communication protocols.

This paper is mostly inspirational, it reminds me about the art of doing cryptography