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 Valley 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 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.
Entrepreneurial Ventures
He 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 advisor 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.
Executive Roles
Elgamal has also held executive roles at technology and security companies, including
CTO of Security at Salesforce.com from 2013 to present
CSO at Axway, Inc. from 2008 to 2011,
CTO at Tumbleweed Communications from 2006 to 2008,
CTO at SePurify, Inc. from 2001 to 2004,
CEO and President of Securify, Inc. from 1998 to 2001 and
Chief Scientist of Netscape Communications from 1995 to 1998.
Achievements
Privacy of internet communication is largely due to work on SSL/TLS by Dr. ElGamal, Paul Kocher and Phil Karlton during the 1990s.
The ElGamal signature scheme. became the basis for Digital Signature Algorithm which was adopted by National Institute of Standards and Technology as the Digital Signature Standard.
Although his H-index score is only 9, his seminal publication alone is cited in over 9,466 scholarly articles, books, magazines and patents as of October 2019 not to mention the millions of crypto-stack implementations that use DSA and other ElGamal variants.
Further, the DSA and by extensionECDSA and several new Homomorphic Encryption schemes are being proposed to further enhance privacy for users data based on Dr. ElGamal's encryption methods.
Recognition
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".
Publications
As a scholar, Elgamal published 4 articles:
T. ElGamal, "A subexponential-time algorithm for computing discrete logarithms over GF," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 473-–481, 1985.
T. Elgamal, "A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms," IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 469–-472, Jul. 1985.
T. ElGamal, "On Computing Logarithms Over Finite Fields," in Advances in Cryptology — CRYPTO ’85 Proceedings, 1986, pp. 396–402.
T. Elgamal, "The new predicaments of security practitioners," Computer Fraud & Security, vol. 2009, no. 11, pp. 12–14, Nov. 2009.
