Taher Elgamal

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Dr. Taher Elgamal (Arabic: طاهر الجمل) (born 18 August 1955) is an Egyptian American cryptographer. Elgamal is sometimes written as El Gamal or ElGamal, but Elgamal is now preferred. 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 has gained a Bachelor of Science degree from Cairo University, and Masters and Doctorate degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University. He served as chief scientist at Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998 where he was a driving force behind SSL. He also was the director of engineering at RSA Security Inc. before founding Securify in 1998 and becoming their CEO. When Securify was acquired by Kroll-O'Gara he became the president of its information security group. Presently (2004), Securify is again independent and Elgamal is Chief Technical Officer & Co-Chair of the Board of Directors. In addition, Elgamal sits on the board of FaceTime Communications [1], a company which provides security solutions for instant messaging and peer-to-peer applications and Phoenix Technologies makers of BIOS systems as well as the Advisory Board of SignaCert, Inc. [2], a company providing Independent IT Controls measurement and software verification at the binary level. Most recently, Elgamal serves as Chairman and CEO of Ektasis, a Silicon Valley startup he founded in late 2004 with co-founders Phil Straw and Mark Chen. In October 2006 he joined Tumbleweed Communications [3] in a capacity of a Chief Technology Officer.

Dr. Elgamal's surname has been spelled as two words (the Arabic "El" part is equivalent to "the" in English), and as a single word with an intra-capital. The cryptographic literature is full of both spellings. Dr. Elgamal himself spells it as a singly-capitalized surname, as this is less likely to be mangled in English.