Taher Elgamal
Dr. Taher Elgamal (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) (born 18 August 1955) is an Egyptian cryptographer and entrepreneur. He is recognized as the "father of SSL" for the work he did in computer security while working at Netscape, which helped in establishing a private and secure communications on the Internet.

Elgamal is also known for his 1985 paper entitled "A Public Key Cryptosystem and A Signature Scheme Based on Discrete Logarithms", in which he proposed the design of the ElGamal discrete log cryptosystem and of the ElGamal signature scheme. The latter scheme became the basis for Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA) adopted by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the Digital Signature Standard (DSS). He has also participated in the "SET" credit card payment protocol, plus a number of Internet payment schemes.

Biography

Early life 
According to an article on Medium, Elgamal's first love was 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 Bachelor of Science degree from Cairo University in 1977, and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1981 and 1984, respectively. Martin Hellman was his dissertation advisor.

Career 
He joined the technical staff at HP Labs in 1984.  He served as chief scientist at Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998, where he was a driving force behind SSL. Dr. Elgamal benefited from being a Stanford grad in Silicon Valley in the "dot-com" era. It could be said that because of his work on SSL/TLS and the work that Netscape was doing with making the web user-friendly, the dot-com era actually became a thing. He also was the director of engineering at RSA Security Inc. before founding Securify in 1998 and becoming its CEO. According to an interview with ElGamal, when Securify was acquired by Kroll-O'Gara, he became the president of its information security group. After helping Securify spin out from Kroll-O'Gara, Taher served as the company's CTO from 2001 to 2004. In late 2008, Securify was acquired by Secure Computing and is now part of McAfee. In October 2006, he joined Tumbleweed Communications in a capacity of a Chief Technology Officer. Tumbleweed was acquired in 2008 by Axway Inc. Elgamal currently serves as the CTO, Security at Salesforce.com.

Entrepreneurial ventures 
He 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.

Achievements 
Privacy of internet communication is largely due to work on SSL/TLS by Dr. ElGamal, Paul Kocher and Phil Karlton during the 1990s.
 The ElGamal signature scheme became the basis for Digital Signature Algorithm (DSA), which was adopted by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as the Digital Signature Standard (DSS).
 Although his h-index score is only 9, his seminal publication alone is cited in over 9,466 scholarly articles, books, magazines and patents as of October 2019, not to mention the millions of crypto-stack implementations that use DSA and other ElGamal variants.
 Further, the DSA and by extension ECDSA and several new homomorphic encryption schemes are being proposed to further enhance privacy for users data based on Dr. ElGamal's encryption methods.

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

Publications 
As a scholar, Elgamal published 4 articles:

 T. ElGamal, "A subexponential-time algorithm for computing discrete logarithms over GF(p2)", 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

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