Taher Elgamal is one of the most popular and richest Cryptographer who was born on August 18, 1955 in Cairo, Cairo Governorate, Egypt.
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 and Paul Kocher were jointly awarded the 2019 Marconi Prize for “their development of SSL/TLS and other contributions to the security of communications”.
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 vallery 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 Securify 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. In 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.
