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A Happy Working Life

Greg Rose graduated from the University of New South Wales with Honours in Computer Science and was awarded the University Medal in 1977.
A member of the Board of Directors of the USENIX Association, he served as program chair of the 1996 USENIX Security Symposium. As Principal Engineer at QUALCOMM, he focuses on cryptographic security and authentication for wireless communications, and on setting up the office of QUALCOMM Australia. He has written a number of public tools for cryptography, and he holds generic cryptographic export licenses for two countries.

From UNSW to becoming a cryptographer - Greg Rose tells us of his journey.

"I had never really thought about my career very much while at UNSW", says Greg Rose, Vice President of Technology, Product Security, at QUALCOMM inc., "I think I expected to just stay there and teach".

But in 1979 Greg had an opportunity to go out into the "real world" and develop software applications in return for more money than the university environment was offering.

Although that job lasted only a short time as the company folded, Greg found that he actually liked the different work, and applying his skills in programming operating systems, and so decided to go into business with two coworkers. "In 1980 we created a small software contracting, sales and support company that was moderately successful, until it tried to expand outside its area of competence."

Greg then had success with Aurema, another operating systems contracting company that he founded in 1985 as Softway Pty Ltd. However, after ten years of managing this string of companies, Greg felt the urge to get his teeth back into his true passion - programming. He took a sabbatical in 1990 at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center where he worked on prototyping of a system for cluster computing. After a year at IBM he returned to Australia and "bounced around for a few years working on computer security."

In 1996 Greg joined Qualcomm, a US manufacturer of chips for a new cellphone technology called CDMA, and founded an Australian office for them. "I was working on cellphone and internet security issues when I accidentally broke a bunch of encryption algorithms used in cellphones. Trying to repair them gave me a new profession as a cryptographer, designing and analysing new stream ciphers and hash functions" says Greg. "Qualcomm has other security issues beside those, though, so I eventually moved to San Diego to oversee product security across the company. And that's where I am today."

Along the way Greg's been involved as a volunteer in a number of professional organizations and other "not-for-profit things". He says, "I've tried to keep learning new skills. Both of these things contribute greatly to a happy working life". And that is a message for us to all take on.

QUALCOMM and USENIX, along with other companies and individuals like Greg Rose and Gernot Heiser, have worked hard to establish the John Lions Chair in Computer Science at UNSW.

John Lions was an Associate Professor at UNSW. Renowned as an outstanding teacher, he wrote a commentary on the UNIX code which became a technical bible for students, hackers and professionals, and was a key factor in developing the Open Source movement.