Taher Elgamal
Dr. Taher Elgamal (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. 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 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). 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 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, where he supports the team in building a leading enterprise cloud security posture. 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 Publications. As a scholar, Elgamal published 4 articles: