Taher Elgamal

Taher A. Elgamal
Taher A. Elgamal (2010)
Born	(1955-08-18) 18 August 1955 (age 61) Cairo, Egypt
Residence	United States
Nationality	Egyptian, United States
Fields	Cryptography
Institutions	Salesforce.com
Alma mater	Cairo University Stanford University
Doctoral advisor	Martin Hellman
Known for	Public-key ElGamal Discrete logarithm cryptography

Taher Elgamal (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) (born 18 August 1955) is an Egyptian cryptographer. In 1985, Elgamal published a paper titled “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 also participated in the 'SET' credit card payment protocol, plus a number of Internet payment schemes.

Elgamal currently serves as the CTO, Security at Salesforce.com. 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 advisor 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 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 has been issued several patents in online security, payments and data compression. 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.