A very useful reading list of technical documents related to internetworking and cybersecurity.
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First introduction to packet switched style distributed networks which were originally designed to create resilient military communications systems that could sustain pretty significant attacks.
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Literally just a brief history of the internet.
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"The most vicious battle on the Net today is a secret war between techies. At stake is nothing less than the organization of cyberspace."
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General overview of the principals/requirements that inspired the design of TCP/IP. A good explination of why TCP/IP looks and works the way it does.
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Original RFC arguing for domain names on the internet, their need and ideas for a domain name system
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RFC that outlines the system that enables computers to automatically configure themselves for network access once they're wired into a network. (i.e. why you don't need to configure anything when you connect to ethernet/WiFi)
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RFC describing the correct implementation of congestion control in TCP. Consider this when comparing ethernet v. WiFi for optimal performance.
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Original research paper outlining Van Jacobson's congestion avoidance and control ideas that are widely used in today's TCP implementations.
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Explains how NATs work and why the world can have more internet connected devices than the internet has IP addresses (at least in IPv4).
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This may help you make sense of device addressing inside your NAT, like what is 192.168.0.0?
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A short slide deck on software-defined networks and why programmable data-planes and centralized control-planes are probably the future of networking
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A very high level overview of datacenter standards/construction
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In the form of a dialogue, describes how M.I.T.'s Kerberos authentication system works.
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Interesting RFC about the importance of entropy in cybersecure systems and different methods that can be used to achieve randomness (or pseudorandomness)
https://www.cs.cornell.edu/people/egs/papers/egs-herbivore.pdf https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~adrian/731-sp04/readings/dcnets.html Chaumian DC-Nets https://www.freehaven.net/anonbib/cache/chaum-mix.pdf http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~fabian/courses/CS600.424/course_papers/goldschlag96hiding.pdf https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/sec04/tech/full_papers/dingledine/dingledine.pdf
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Just an article about how buffer overflows work
https://www.schneier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/paper-self-study.pdf https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/vpns/prime-numbers-public-key-cryptography-969 https://wmx-api-production.s3.amazonaws.com/courses/3455/supplementary/STIX_Whitepaper_v1.1.pdf