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

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 BSc from Cairo University in 1977, and MS and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University in 1981 and 1984, respectively. Martin Hellman was his dissertation advisor.

Career

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." 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.

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

Recognition

Publications

As a scholar, Elgamal published 4 articles: