Taher Elgamal —One of the Fathers of SSL and Creator of ElGamal Encryption
Taher Elgamal —One of the Fathers of SSL and Creator of ElGamal Encryption
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. Along with this, he published this paper in 1985 [here]:
It was true classic, and has been reference over 11,400 times. Within the paper, Tahir outlined an encryption methods and a digital signature method. His ‘base’ was to take John Napier’s logarithm, and make them discrete. This discrete element meant that we only dealt with positive integer values, and where we worked within a finite field. This field was defined by a prime number (p).
While the core ElGamal encryption method was overtaken in its usage by RSA, and then by ECC (Elliptic Curve Cryptography), the signature method was adopted as the Digital Signature Standard (DSS) by NIST. This has since scaled into ECC to become ECDSA, and which is used by Bitcoin and Ethereum.
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 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:
In the following, I’ve outline the basics of the ElGamal method:
And if you are interested, here’s more details on ElGamal encryption: