Taher Elgamal

Taher Elgamal - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Taher Elgamal

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

This profile of Taher Elgamal covers Early Life and Family Background and Career and Rise to Fame.

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 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). His development of the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) cryptographic protocol at Netscape in the 1990s was also the basis for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and HTTPS Internet protocols.

Early Life and Family Background of Taher Elgamal

Elgamal was born in Egypt. He earned a BSc in electrical engineering from Cairo University in 1977, and an MS and PhD in the same field from Stanford University in 1981 and 1984, respectively. Martin Hellman was his dissertation advisor.

Career and Rise to Fame of Taher Elgamal

Elgamal 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 Secure Sockets Layer. Network World described him as the "father of SSL." SSL was the basis for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and HTTPS Internet protocols.

He also was the director of engineering at RSA Security Inc. Before founding Securify in 1998 and becoming its chief executive officer. 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 chief technology officer (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 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.

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.

Elgamal has also held executive roles at technology and security companies, including

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taher_Elgamal), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.