Taher Elgamal

Early life

Elgamal was born in Egypt. He earned a BSc in electrical engineering from Cairo University in 1977, and an MS and PhD in the same field from Stanford University in 1981 and 1984, respectively. Martin Hellman was his dissertation advisor.

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." SSL was the basis for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and HTTPS Internet protocols.

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.