Influential Security Papers
This webpage is an attempt to assemble a ranking of top-cited papers from the area of computer security. The ranking is automatically created based on citations of papers published at top security conferences. In particular, the ranking is based on the four tier-1 conferences (see the System Security Circus)
and the following tier-2 conferences
The citations for each paper are determined by crawling the DBLP service and Google Scholar. As both services limit crawling activity, the update interval for the ranking is large, such that citation counts change on average every two months.
Update: The crawling mechanism for DBLP has been updated on July 1, 2022. As a result, the paper database may show a few inconsistencies. This effect will disappear over the next months.
Top of the Notch
Top-cited papers from 1980 to 2024 ⌄
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1
Ravi S. Sandhu, Edward J. Coyne, Hal L. Feinstein, and Charles E. Youman:
Role-based access control: a multi-dimensional view.
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 1994
5366% above average of year
Visited: May-2024
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2
Nicholas Carlini and David A. Wagner:
Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks.
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2017
6485% above average of year
Visited: May-2024
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3
Vipul Goyal, Omkant Pandey, Amit Sahai, and Brent Waters:
Attribute-based encryption for fine-grained access control of encrypted data.
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 2006
3332% above average of year
Visited: May-2024
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4
John Bethencourt, Amit Sahai, and Brent Waters:
Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption.
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2007
3001% above average of year
Visited: May-2024
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5
Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway:
Random Oracles are Practical: A Paradigm for Designing Efficient Protocols.
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 1993
4331% above average of year
Visited: Apr-2024
→ Check out the top-100 ranking
Absolute citations are not necessarily a good indicator for the impact of a paper, as the number of citations usually grows with the age of a paper. The following list shows an alternative ranking, where the citations are normalized by the age of each paper.
Top-cited papers normalized by age ⌄
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1
Nicholas Carlini and David A. Wagner:
Towards Evaluating the Robustness of Neural Networks.
IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (S&P), 2017
6485% above average of year
Visited: May-2024
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2
Ravi S. Sandhu, Edward J. Coyne, Hal L. Feinstein, and Charles E. Youman:
Role-based access control: a multi-dimensional view.
Annual Computer Security Applications Conference (ACSAC), 1994
5366% above average of year
Visited: May-2024
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3
Nicholas Carlini, Jamie Hayes, Milad Nasr, Matthew Jagielski, Vikash Sehwag, Florian Tramèr, Borja Balle, Daphne Ippolito, and Eric Wallace:
Extracting Training Data from Diffusion Models.
USENIX Security Symposium, 2023
5030% above average of year
Visited: Apr-2024
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4
Mihir Bellare and Phillip Rogaway:
Random Oracles are Practical: A Paradigm for Designing Efficient Protocols.
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS), 1993
4331% above average of year
Visited: Apr-2024
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5
Nicholas Carlini, Florian Tramèr, Eric Wallace, Matthew Jagielski, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Katherine Lee, Adam Roberts, Tom B. Brown, Dawn Song, Úlfar Erlingsson, Alina Oprea, and Colin Raffel:
Extracting Training Data from Large Language Models.
USENIX Security Symposium, 2021
3539% above average of year
Visited: May-2024
→ Check out the normalized top-100 ranking
The Last Decades
If you are interested in a more detailed breakdown of top-cited papers over time, you can find can find rankings for the last decades here:
Limitations
As with any ranking, the presented results do not necessarily reflect the true impact of a paper. Citations are only one metric to assess the reception of a paper and are insufficient to characterize all aspects contributing to the relevance of scientific work. Moreover, the underlying data may contain errors or missing information. Errare humanum est.
Contact
If you have questions, comments, complains, or ideas how to improve this webpage, feel free to send an email to Konrad Rieck. Alternatively, you can contact me on Twitter.