“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” — Albert Einstein

Serial Entrepreneur: Taher Elgamal (Part 7)

Friday, March 30, 2007 | 4 comments

Taher continues the discussion regarding the development of SSL at Netscape, and then moving on to his next startup.

SM: What did you have to do to the SSL algorithm? TE: It had security issues that needed to be fixed. It really had to be bullet proof for eCommerce.

SM: It had holes? TE: Just some security issues with the initial design. Anything that is version 1.0 is going to be weak. They wanted to hire a whole bunch of people to fix the thing, and I became their Chief Scientist. It is true that I wrote what became the SSL patents for Netscape. We then got a team of people, which was one of the best teams ever assembled, to actually fix the details of the SSL protocol before it took off word wide. The current version of SSL, or TLS, is a result of that work in 1995. I had the overall responsibility for making SSL successful. I ended up convincing Microsoft to go that route, which was really the event that made SSL successful. When Microsoft signed up, and we had the patents, then everybody could do whatever they wanted to do with it.

SM: Was that the right move in retrospect? TE: Absolutely. It is difficult to expect any company or group of companies will directly make money from a security algorithm. It is not useful. The useful thing is we enabled e-commerce on the entire Internet. Imagine, for every single login, or transaction which happens on the internet, when you see the lock in the bottom of the browser, it is our work. If it was not done, it would have exposed ecommerce because people would not be able to have the security. In hindsight it was exactly the right thing to do. To open up the protocol.

SM: How long did you stay at Netscape? TE: After we finished the SSL work there were lots of Internet payment projects that I got involved with, and a lot of government negotiations. But in 1998 I got bored again.

SM: This is a common theme! TE: Exactly right, if you want to know why entrepreneurs are the way they are, it is because they get bored. I went to Jim and I told him that we had solved most of the security problems, and it was time for me to go. I told him I was going to start my own security consulting company. He ended up investing in Securify, and he did well on it, and made money on the deal.

This segment is part 7 in a 13 part series Segment 8 →
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