This is a good list. It’s interesting to me that it emphasizes historic papers that were quite novel when they were published. These papers were impactful, and are thus good on some absolute scale. But they were not written to be introductions to their topic, and they do not reflect more modern thinking on the topic.

Reflections on Trusting Trust is seminal. In the age of networked computing and open source (and decades of apparently no one mounting a meaningful exploit along these lines) one is asking the reader to do a lot of work to generalize from the concepts in the paper to ideas of security and trust that align with their experience. I could imagine (and did) reading this paper in a class with a moderated discussion. But without the discussion I suspect it would fall flat for many readers.

In the comments people suggest the original Paxos paper. It is cute, but incredibly difficult to understand IMO. For people already aware of network programming primitives, Lamport doesn’t use any of them instead inventing his own metaphors. I tend to think Raft was so successful when it came out because it was described more clearly, not that it was a better algorithm.

It would be interesting to find better more accessible ways of learning the same material. Or maybe the best would be an edited volume, like a textbook, interleaving these classic papers with modern analysis, reflection, and commentary.