Taher Elgamal[a] (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) (born 18 August 1955) is an Egyptian
cryptographer and entrepreneur. He has served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Security at
Salesforce since 2013.[1] 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 while working at Netscape, which helped in establishing a private and secure communications on the Internet.[2]
According to an article on Medium,[4] 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 joined the technical staff at
HP Labs in 1984. He served as chief scientist at Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998,[6] where he was a driving force behind
Secure Sockets Layer.[7] He also was the director of engineering at
RSA Security Inc.[8] before founding
Securify in 1998 and becoming its
chief executive officer. According to an interview with Elgamal,[9] when Securify was acquired by
Kroll-O'Gara,[10] he became the president of its
information security group. After helping Securify spin out from Kroll-O'Gara,[11] Taher served as the company's chief technology officer (CTO) from 2001 to 2004.[12] In late 2008, Securify was acquired by Secure Computing[13] and is now part of
McAfee.[14] In October 2006, he joined
Tumbleweed Communications as a CTO.[15] Tumbleweed was acquired in 2008 by Axway Inc. Elgamal is now a CTO for security at Salesforce.com.[4][16]
Entrepreneurial ventures
Elgamal is a co-founder of NokNok Labs[17] and InfoSec Global.[citation needed] He serves as a director of Vindicia, Inc.,[18] which provides online payment services,
Zix Corporation, which provides email encryption services, and Bay Dynamics.[19] 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,[20]
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.[8]
Recognition
Elgamal is a recipient of the RSA Conference 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award,[8] and he is recognized as the "father of SSL,"[2] 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".[21]
Election to the
National Academy of Engineering, 2022, for contributions to cryptography, e-commerce, and protocols for secure internet transactions.[22]
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.[23]
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.[3]
T. ElGamal, "On Computing Logarithms Over Finite Fields", in Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO ’85 Proceedings, 1986, pp. 396–402.[24]
T. Elgamal, "The new predicaments of security practitioners", Computer Fraud & Security, vol. 2009, no. 11, pp. 12–14, Nov. 2009.[25]
Notes
^The spellings El Gamal and ElGamal are also found in cryptographic literature. He himself spells it Elgamal (one word, singly capitalized), as it is less likely to be mangled in English.
^Elgamal, T. (July 1985). "A subexponential-time algorithm for computing discrete logarithms over GF(p²)". IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. 31 (4): 473–481.
doi:
10.1109/TIT.1985.1057075.
^ElGamal, Taher (1986). "On Computing Logarithms over Finite Fields". In Williams, Hugh C. (ed.). Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO '85 Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 218. Springer Berlin Heidelberg. pp. 396–402.
doi:10.1007/3-540-39799-x_28.
ISBN9783540397991.