Serial Entrepreneur: Taher Elgamal (Part 6)
Check other articles in the series...Taher was also one of the key individuals associated with the development of SSL at Netscape. In this episode, we discuss the genesis of that work.
SM: Why did you leave when the company was just taking off? TE: I got bored. When I told Jim I got bored, and he told me I could do some marketing. I did not know what that meant, so I decided to take off. I did a lot of consulting for a while, which was a really fun experience. I consulted to some obscure companies, and to others who worked for Sun. In late 1994 I went to an IEC conference in San Jose to see what people were talking about at the time. I saw Jim Clarke, whom I knew from Stanford because he was in graphics. I saw him and decided to sit in on his presentation which was all about encryption. It turned into Netscape. I sent him an email afterwards to reintroduce myself, and asked him why he was talking about cryptography – I think I know more about that than you – I teased. He responded right away and ended up asking me to come talk to Netscape. I went and consulted with them for a few months, and then became a full time Chief Scientist in April of 1995.
SM: That is the genesis of your SSL work? TE: The world uses SSL in a lot of different ways. I have a scientific piece of me which will never leave. When people say I invented SSL, I do not exactly understand what that means.
SM: I was hoping to explore that in a bit more detail to understand what was going on in your head and in the market? TE: Jim Clark, from the beginning of Netscape, before I got there, had the idea that the Internet was too open. He thought that the internet was such a big infrastructure it could be used for ecommerce, but realized it could not be done in an open network because everybody could see everything. He went to RSA and asked to license their crypto tool kits because they wanted to build an Internet ecommerce business, and he did sign a license from RSA.
The original SSL idea came from the very early days at Netscape, I did not generate that idea. There was a version of SSL that was developed, not completely, but it was developed before I showed up. When I was hired, my number one task was to make SSL successful. We basically updated the original algorithm at that point.
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