Taher Elgamal (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) (born 18 August 1955) is an Egyptian
cryptographer
Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or ''-logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adver ...
and entrepreneur. He has 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 customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...
since 2013. 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. He has been described as the "father of
SSL" for the work he did in
computer security
Computer security, cybersecurity (cyber security), or information technology security (IT security) is the protection of computer systems and networks from attack by malicious actors that may result in unauthorized information disclosure, the ...
while working at Netscape, which helped in establishing a private and secure communications on the Internet.
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 signature ...
.
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 physical sci ...
(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 1994 ...
(DSS).
Biography
Early life
According to an article on Medium,
Elgamal's first love was
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
. 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 ( ar, جامعة القاهرة, Jāmi‘a al-Qāhira), also known as the Egyptian University from 1908 to 1940, and King Fuad I University and Fu'ād al-Awwal University from 1940 to 1952, is Egypt's premier public university ...
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 which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...
from
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
in 1981 and 1984, respectively.
Martin Hellman
Martin Edward Hellman (born October 2, 1945) is an American cryptologist and mathematician, best known for his involvement with public key cryptography in cooperation with Whitfield Diffie and Ralph Merkle. Hellman is a longtime contributor to th ...
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
Secure Sockets Layer
Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol designed to provide communications security over a computer network. The protocol is widely used in applications such as email, instant messaging, and voice over IP, but its use in securi ...
. He also was the director of engineering at
RSA Security
RSA Security LLC, formerly RSA Security, Inc. and doing business as RSA, is an American computer and network security company with a focus on encryption and encryption standards. RSA was named after the initials of its co-founders, Ron Rivest, ...
Inc.
before founding
Securify in 1998 and becoming its
chief executive officer
A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...
. According to an interview with Elgamal, when Securify was acquired by
Kroll-O'Gara
Kroll is an American corporate investigation and risk consulting firm established in 1972 and based in New York City. In 2018, Kroll was acquired by Duff & Phelps. In 2021, Duff & Phelps decided to rebrand itself as Kroll, a process it complet ...
, he became the president of its information security 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 global computer security software company head ...
. In October 2006, he joined
Tumbleweed Communications
Tumbleweed Communications Corp. provided secure messaging and secure file transfer solutions for enterprise and government customers. Tumbleweed Communications merged with Axway in 2008.
Tumbleweed products were used to block security threats, ...
as a CTO. Tumbleweed was acquired in 2008 by Axway Inc. Elgamal is now a CTO for security at Salesforce.com.
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 present,
* 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 a ...
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, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Engineering is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy ...
, 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:Elgamal, Taher
1955 births
American people of Egyptian descent
Egyptian electrical engineers
Modern cryptographers
Public-key cryptographers
Egyptian cryptographers
American cryptographers
Cairo University alumni
Living people
Chief technology officers