TechWadi

Dr. Taher Elgamal

Recipient of TechWadi’s 2007 “Achievement in Startups” Award

 Chief Technology Officer, Tumbleweed Communications.

Dr. Taher Elgamal is an Egyptian American 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.

Dr. Elgamal obtained his 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, a company which provides security solutions for instant messaging and peer-to-peer applications and Phoenix Technologies makers of BIOS systems. 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 in a capacity of a Chief Technology Officer.

Brief Bio:

Board Member
Officer and Director
Tumbleweed Communications Corp (NASDAQ:TMWD)
Tumbleweed solutions are used to make email, file transfer, and Web communications secure, reliable, and automated. Products include: SecureTransport, Secure Redirect, Valicert Validation Authority and the Tumbleweed EMail Firewall

Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Ektasis , Inc.

Board Member
Hifn Inc
Hifn, of Los Gatos, California makes integrated circuits and software for storage and network infrastructure developers. Hifn’s integrated data flow technology enables intelligent secure networks with compression, encryption and application-aware classification. This is central to the.  More

Chief Scientist
Netscape Communications Corporation

Board Member
President and Chief Executive Officer
Securify , Inc.
Securify solutions deliver real-time visibility and control of network relationships and behavior between users and critical business systems. Securify uniquely delivers network security monitoring that is both application layer 7 aware and also correlated to user identities. Our solution.  More


Board Member
Phoenix Technologies Ltd. (NASDAQ:PTEC)
Phoenix Technologies builds world-class core system software platforms, tools and applications that take full advantage of our history of expertiseat the core of digital devices, to enable the broadest set of users a more simple, trusted and reliable experience. Phoenix is dedicated.  More

Director of Engineering
RSA Security Inc. (NASDAQ:RSAS)


Ph.D., Electric Engineering
Stanford University

Ph.D., Computer Science
Stanford University

Master of Science, Computer Science
Stanford University

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science
Cairo University

Bachelor of Science, Electrical Engineering
Cairo University