Uwe Hermann | A slightly paranoid Debian developer

Maximilian Dornseif from the Laboratory for Dependable Distributed Systems at the RWTH Aachen has written a blog post called Top 18 Papers in Information Security. Definately worth a read!
There's a broad range of papers from "New Directions in Cryptography" by W. Diffie und M. E. Hellman (public key cryptography) from 1976 to "Intercepting Mobile Communications: The Insecurity of 802.11" by N. Borisov, I. Goldberg, and D. Wagner from 2001.