Biography of Steve Babbage

Steve Babbage is the newly elected chairman of ETSI SAGE — the "Security Algorithms Group of Experts". SAGE has designed many cryptographic algorithms for international telecommunications standards, including the algorithms for the 3GPP/UMTS mobile telephony standard.

Quote from Bruce Schneier: All GSM providers and equipment vendors are part of the GSM Association. The algorithms were designed and analyzed by the secretive "SAGE" group (which is really part of ETSI). We don't know who the people are or what their resumes look like.

Steve Babbage lives in Newbury, UK; he is married with two young children.

He began his career in the mathematics department of Racal Comsec Ltd, a company that designed, manufactured and supplied communication security equipment for both commercial and military use around the world. Since 1995 he has worked for Vodafone, the world’s largest mobile telecommunications company; he currently works for Vodafone Group Research & Development, where he manages the security technologies team. He is the leading practising cryptographer in the Vodafone group.

Steve’s specialist area in cryptology is stream ciphers; although most of his work is unpublished, he was the originator of the time-memory tradeoff technique recently elaborated upon by Biryukov, Shamir and Wagner to attack the GSM A5/1 algorithm.