Welcome to Greg Rose's Home Page

This is the future of the home page that used to be at http://people.qualcomm.com/ggr

Greg looks all right in a suit, and has even been a magazine cover model! Of course, Greg got older. This is a 2007 professional photo.

Address

QUALCOMM Incorporated

5775 Morehouse Drive

San Diego, CA, 92121

USA

Personal Statement 2010-08-14

I heard (approximately) this on NPR news a few minutes ago.

"A drone killed 12 people in Pakistan today, two of them were suspected Taliban agents. It was the first drone attack since massive flooding hit the area."

So, why is it reasonable, or even acceptable, to have a five-to-one ratio of innocents killed for suspected bad guys? In a country that, at least some of the time, is allied, and that we aren't even pretending to be at war with?

And what's the connection with the massive flooding, except maybe that someone thinks they've suffered enough? I don't get it at all.

Previous diatribes

Cryptography and Security

Some interesting cryptographic utilities and papers can be found at QUALCOMM's open source portal. (These used to be at qualcomm.com.au.)

Greg uses cryptography extensively, and has some interesting links. His various PGP public keys are available (if you can't use the newer style Diffie-Hellman/DSS keys you need this instead). Note that Greg uses a multi-level key scheme, with a very secure top level key and less secure keys for personal/USENIX and QUALCOMM related work. Or you can use S/MIME encryption with this CAcert certificate.

He also developed the PGP Moose which allows newsgroup moderators to authenticate postings, and which automatically cancels unauthentic postings. This is still in use but not really supported any more.

Greg was the Program Chair for USENIX's Sixth USENIX Security Symposium focusing on Applications of Cryptography and was invited talks coordinator for the 7th USENIX Security Symposium  For the Eigth, he was Works-In-Progress coordinator. For the Ninth, he was Program Co-Chair with Steve Bellovin. Tenth, Invited talks coordinator again. Taking a rest. He worked on a PGP key signing service and electronic voting for USENIX.

Greg was a member of the Board of the International Association for Cryptologic Research, by virtue of having served as General Chair of Crypto'03. Currently running for the board again.

Greg developed the SOBER family (including Turing, NLS and Shannon) of stream ciphers for embedded application. This and other software and publications can be found at QUALCOMM's open source portal.

Greg is proud to be founding member #1 of LOPSA, the League of Professional System Administrators, for which he was also on the leadership committee.

Greg for a while became President of CAcert, Inc, a not-for-profit Certificate Authority that issues free certificates based on a web-of-trust identification model.

Greg is the lesser co-author of BigNum Math with Tom St Denis.

About Greg Rose

Founder and Managing Director of Fawnray Pty Ltd (became Neology Ltd). Founder and Managing Director of Softway Pty Ltd, became AUREMA, sold to Citrix in 2006, long after Greg left. Visiting Scientist at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1991. Manager of the Open Distributed Systems Program at the Australian Computing and Communications Institute. UNIX product engineer for Sterling Software. Joined QUALCOMM in July 1996 as a senior staff engineer/manager, working on cryptography and authentication for CDMA cellular phone systems, and to set up the office of QUALCOMM Australia.  Moved to the USA in 2004. Currently senior vice president of engineering, in the office of the chief scientist. Enjoying work immensely.

Involved with the use and development of the UNIX Operating System since its arrival in Australia in 1974. Founding secretary and past president of AUUG. Founding treasurer of SAGE-AU, the System Administrator's Guild of Australia. Past Vice President of the USENIX Association. Past Member of the Board of Directors of the International Association for Cryptologic Research. President of CAcert, a free certificate authority.

Experienced teacher at university and in private courses, mostly involving cryptography and security, programming languages, operating systems, and implications of software and hardware technology.

Many years ago now (2001, last minor revision in 2004), I wrote a full day tutorial called "Cryptographic Algorithms Revealed". Here are the slides and printable notes pages. This is the original blurb for the course:

This tutorial will require some mathematical background from
attendees. At the very least, familiarity with common mathematical
notation, polynomials, and some elementary statistical knowledge will
be needed. You've been warned.

In this advanced tutorial, attendees will get a fairly detailed overview
of what makes cryptographic algorithms work, and when they don't work,
how they are broken. Some of the AES finalists are covered to provide
lessons in block ciphers, with the winner (Rijndael) treated in depth.

Topics covered (unless time runs out):

Brief History
       substitution and transposition
       development of DES
       public key cryptography

Symmetric Block Ciphers
       Feistel ciphers generally
       DES
       Other AES Candidates (Twofish, RC6, Serpent)
       Rijndael (AES) in depth
       Block Cipher modes of operation

Symmetric Stream Ciphers
       Linear Feedback Shift Registers
       A5, SOBER and other LFSR based constructions

Cryptanalysis
       Differential & Linear cryptanalysis
       Attack assumptions and threat models
       Attacks on stream ciphers

Public Key systems
       Group and Finite field theory
       Discrete Log systems (El Gamal, Diffie-Hellman, DSS)
       RSA
       Elliptic curves

Other stuff:
       Hash functions, SHA-1, SHA-256

Recently, people have been asking me for some of my old publications (generally not crypto related). Many of them are in archaic formats. When I get a round tuit, I might put more of them here. For the moment, here is: