World Leaders in Cryptography: Tahir ElGamal

In research, we build on the shoulders of giants, and Taher Elgamal is one the giants of cybersecurity. His work on Netscape led to the creation of SSL, and for which much of our Web security is still built on. His paper on "A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms" is true classic, and has been referenced over 11,600 times. Within the paper, Tahir outlined an encryption method and a digital signature method. His ‘base’ was to take John Napier’s logarithm, and make them discrete. The signature method was adopted as the Digital Signature Standard (DSS) by NIST, and which has to become ECDSA, as used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Elgamal methods is now being used in many new areas of privacy, including within homomorphic encryption methods.

Tahir studied electrical engineering in the late 1970s at Stanford University. It was there he met Marty Hellman and who helped him spark an interesting in cryptography. He received his PhD in 1984 and it was Marty who introduced him to Paul Kocker at Netscape Communications. Together, Paul and Tahir worked on a method to implement end-to-end encryption, and published SSL 3.0 in November 1996.

Join this "fireside chat", as Taher recalls his past, and also looks to the future.