These security and cryptography papers are among the most cited between the years 2008 and 2013. Source data is from Google Scholar Metrics and Microsoft Academic Search. The papers are roughly in the order of citations per year:

  1. A Fully Homomorphic Encryption Scheme
    C Gentry, PhD Thesis, 2009

    Craig Gentry presented the first fully homomorphic encryption scheme, which allows both multiplication and addition operations between encrypted data.

  2. Hey, you, get off of my cloud: exploring information leakage in third-party compute cloud
    T Ristenpart, E Tromer, H Shacham, S Savage, CCS, 2009

    This paper discusses how to target a VM running on an IaaS provider and mount cross-VM side-channel attacks.

  3. Android Permissions Demystified
    AP Felt, E Chin, S Hanna, D Song, D Wagner, CCS, 2011

    This paper presents Stowaway, a tool which can analyze Android apps and determine whether they are overprivileged.

  4. Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption: An Expressive, Efficient, and Provably Secure Realization
    B Waters, Public Key Cryptography, 2011

    This paper presents a more efficient construction of an Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) scheme.

  5. A Study of Android Application Security
    W Enck, D Octeau, P McDaniel, S Chaudhuri, Usenix Security 2011

    This paper presents the ded decompiler, which recovers Android app source code from the installation image.

  6. Fully homomorphic encryption over the integers
    M van Dijk, C Gentry, S Halevi, V Vaikuntanathan, Eurocrypt 2010

    This paper presents a "somewhat homomorphic" encryption scheme using basic modular arithmetic, then uses Gentry's techniques to convert it to a fully homomorphic scheme.

  7. Lest We Remember: Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys
    JA Halderman, SD Schoen, N Heninger, W Clarkson, W Paul, JA Calandrino, AJ Feldman, J Applebaum, E Felton, Usenix Security, 2008

    The "cold boot" paper: demonstrating how to recover data remnants from frozen DRAM modules and extract encryption keys.

  8. BotMiner: Clustering Analysis of Network Traffic for Protocol-and Structure-Independent Botnet Detection
    G Gu, R Perdisci, J Zhang, W Lee, Usenix Security, 2008

    This paper presents a botnet detection framework that is independent of a specific botnet C&C protocol.

  9. Robust De-anonymization of Large Sparse Datasets and De-anonymizing Social Networks
    A Narayanan, V Shmatikov, IEEE Security & Privacy 2008 and 2009

    Both papers cover de-anonymizing large sets of supposedly anonymized data, including the Netflix Prize data set and social networks.

  10. Fully Secure Functional Encryption: Attribute-based Encryption and (Hierarchical) Inner Product Encryption
    A Lewko, T Okamoto, A Sahai, K Takashima, B Waters, Eurocrypt, 2010

    This paper gives two constructions of secure functional encryption schemes.

  11. HAIL: a high-availability and integrity layer for cloud storage
    KD Bowers, A Juels, A Oprea, CCS, 2009

    A distributed cryptographic system that allows a set of servers to prove to a client that a stored file is intact and retrievable.

  12. Controlling Data in the Cloud: Outsourcing Computation without Outsourcing Control
    R Chow, P Golle, M Jakobsson, E Shi, J Staddon, R Masuoka, J Molina, CCSW, 2009

    This paper reviews the state of data security when outsourcing computation in the cloud.

  13. Trapdoors for Hard Lattices and New Cryptographic Constructions
    C Gentry, C Peikert, V Vaikuntanathan, STOC, 2008

    This paper discusses how to use standard lattice problems as building blocks for cryptographic trapdoor functions.

  14. Your Botnet is My Botnet: Analysis of a Botnet Takeover
    B Stone-Gross, M Cova, L Cavallaro, B Gilbert, M Szydlowski, R Kemmerer, C Kruegel, G Vigna, CCS, 2009

    This paper describes the authors' attempt to take over the Torpig botnet and observe its operations for a 10 day period.

  15. Fully homomorphic encryption with relatively small key and ciphertext sizes
    NP Smart, F Vercauteren, Public Key Crypto, 2010

    A version of Gentry's fully homomorphic encryption scheme with smaller message expansion and key size.