Taher Elgamal (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) (born 18 August 1955) is an Egyptian-American

cryptographer Cryptography, or cryptology (from "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior. More gen ...

and tech executive. Since January 2023, he has been a partner at venture capital firm Evolution Equity Partners. Prior to that, he was the founder and CEO of Securify and the director of engineering at RSA Security. From 1995 to 1998, he was the chief scientist at Netscape Communications. From 2013 to 2023, he served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Security at

Salesforce Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, artificial intelligence, and ap ...

. Elgamal's 1985 paper entitled "A Public Key Cryptosystem and A Signature Scheme Based on Discrete Logarithms" proposed the design of the ElGamal discrete log cryptosystem and of the

ElGamal signature scheme The ElGamal signature scheme is a digital signature scheme which is based on the difficulty of computing discrete logarithms. It was described by Taher Elgamal in 1985. (conference version appeared in CRYPTO'84, pp. 10–18) The ElGamal signatu ...

. The latter scheme became the basis for

Digital Signature Algorithm The Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) is a Public-key cryptography, public-key cryptosystem and Federal Information Processing Standards, Federal Information Processing Standard for digital signatures, based on the mathematical concept of modular e ...

(DSA) adopted by

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into Outline of p ...

(NIST) as the

Digital Signature Standard The Digital Signature Standard (DSS) is a Federal Information Processing Standard specifying a suite of algorithms that can be used to generate digital signatures established by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 19 ...

(DSS). His development of the

Secure Sockets Layer Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, ...

(SSL)

cryptographic protocol A cryptographic protocol is an abstract or concrete Communications protocol, protocol that performs a information security, security-related function and applies cryptographic methods, often as sequences of cryptographic primitives. A protocol desc ...

at Netscape in the 1990s was also the basis for the

Transport Layer Security Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network, such as the Internet. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over ...

(TLS) and

HTTPS Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is an extension of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). It uses encryption for secure communication over a computer network, and is widely used on the Internet. In HTTPS, the communication protoc ...

Internet protocols The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suite are ...

Biography

Early life

According to an article on Medium, Elgamal's first love was

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

. Although he came to the United States to pursue a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, he said that "cryptography was the most beautiful use of math he'd ever seen". Elgamal earned a BSc from

Cairo University Cairo University () is Egypt's premier public university. Its main campus is in Giza, immediately across the Nile from Cairo. It was founded on 21 December 1908;"Brief history and development of Cairo University." Cairo University Faculty of En ...

in 1977, and MS and PhD degrees in

Electrical Engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

from

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

in 1981 and 1984, respectively.

Martin Hellman Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his invention of public-key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to the ...

was his dissertation advisor.

Career

Elgamal joined the technical staff at

HP Labs HP Labs is the exploratory and advanced research group for HP Inc. HP Labs' headquarters is in Palo Alto, California and the group has research and development facilities in Bristol, UK. The development of programmable desktop calculators, ink ...

in 1984. He served as chief scientist at Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998, where he was a driving force behind

. ''Network World'' described him as the "father of SSL." SSL was the basis for the

(TLS) and

. He also was the director of engineering at

RSA Security RSA Security LLC, formerly RSA Security, Inc. and trade name RSA, is an American computer security, computer and network security company with a focus on encryption and decryption standards. RSA was named after the initials of its co-founders, ...

Inc. before founding Securify in 1998 and becoming its

chief executive officer A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

. According to an interview with Elgamal, when Securify was acquired by Kroll-O'Gara, he became the president of its

information security Information security is the practice of protecting information by mitigating information risks. It is part of information risk management. It typically involves preventing or reducing the probability of unauthorized or inappropriate access to data ...

group. After helping Securify spin out from Kroll-O'Gara, Taher served as the company's chief technology officer (CTO) from 2001 to 2004. In late 2008, Securify was acquired by Secure Computing and is now part of

McAfee McAfee Corp. ( ), formerly known as McAfee Associates, Inc. from 1987 to 1997 and 2004 to 2014, Network Associates Inc. from 1997 to 2004, and Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017, is an American proprietary software company focused on online ...

. In October 2006, he joined

Tumbleweed Communications Tumbleweed Communications Corp. provided secure messaging and secure file transfer solutions for enterprise and government customers. The company became a publicly traded company in 1999, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange under the symbol TMW ...

as a CTO. Tumbleweed was acquired in 2008 by Axway Inc. Until 2023, Elgamal was CTO for security at Salesforce.com. He now works as a partner at Evolution Equity Partners.

Entrepreneurial ventures

Elgamal is a co-founder of NokNok Labs and InfoSec Global. He serves as a director of Vindicia, Inc., which provides online payment services, Zix Corporation, which provides email encryption services, and Bay Dynamics. He has served as an adviser to Cyphort, Bitglass, Onset Ventures, Glenbrook Partners, PGP corporation, Arcot Systems, Finjan, Actiance, Symplified, and Zetta. He served as Chief Security Officer of Axway, Inc. He is vice chairman of SecureMisr.

Executive roles

Elgamal has also held executive roles at technology and security companies, including * CTO of Security at Salesforce.com from 2013 to 2023, * CSO at Axway, Inc. from 2008 to 2011, * CTO at Tumbleweed Communications from 2006 to 2008, * CTO at Securify, Inc. from 2001 to 2004, * CEO and President of Securify, Inc. from 1998 to 2001 and, * Chief Scientist of Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998.

Recognition

* Elgamal is a recipient of the RSA Conference 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award, and he is recognized as the "father of SSL," the Internet security standard Secure Sockets Layer. * Elgamal and Paul Kocher were jointly awarded the 2019

Marconi Prize The Marconi Prize is an annual award recognizing achievements and advancements made in field of communications (radio, mobile, wireless, telecommunications, data communications, networks, and Internet). The prize is awarded by the Marconi Society ...

for "their development of SSL/ TLS and other contributions to the security of communications". * Election to the

National Academy of Engineering The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) is an American Nonprofit organization, nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. It is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), along with the National Academ ...

, 2022, for contributions to cryptography, e-commerce, and protocols for secure internet transactions.

Publications

As a scholar, Elgamal published 4 articles: * T. ElGamal, "A subexponential-time algorithm for computing discrete logarithms over ''GF''(''p''²)", IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 473–481, 1985. * T. Elgamal, "A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms", IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 469–472, Jul. 1985. * T. ElGamal, "On Computing Logarithms Over Finite Fields", in Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO ’85 Proceedings, 1986, pp. 396–402. * T. Elgamal, "The new predicaments of security practitioners", Computer Fraud & Security, vol. 2009, no. 11, pp. 12–14, Nov. 2009.

Notes

References

External links

*
Serial Entrepreneur Interview with Sramana Mitra
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gamal, Taher 1955 births American people of Egyptian descent Egyptian electrical engineers Public-key cryptographers Egyptian cryptographers American cryptographers Cairo University alumni Living people American chief technology officers