ASecuritySite Podcast

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. His paper on "A public key cryptosystem and a signature scheme based on discrete logarithms" is true classic, and has been referenced over 11,600 times. Within the paper, Tahir outlined an encryption method and a digital signature method. His 'base' was to take John Napier's logarithm, and make them discrete. The signature method was adopted as the Digital Signature Standard (DSS) by NIST, and which has to become ECDSA, as used by Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Elgamal methods is now being used in many new areas of privacy, including within homomorphic encryption methods.

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 who 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.

Join this "fireside chat", as Taher recalls his past, and also looks to the future.

In this episode Professor William Buchanan OBE talks with by Dan Shumow, Senior Software Development Engineer in the Security and Cryptography group, about cryptography, RSA and the researcher's mindset.

Len is a co-creator of the RSA encryption algorithm [1] and received the 2002 Turing Award (often defined as the Nobel Prize of Computer Science). The RSA paper is one of the most significant computer science papers ever published and has received over 25,695 citations. Len is also known for the creation of DNA computing. He is a professor at the University of Southern California and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.

[1] Rivest, R. L., Shamir, A., & Adleman, L. (1978). A method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems. Communications of the ACM, 21(2), 120-126.

In this episode Professor William Buchanan OBE talks with Professor Martin Hellman, a world-renowned cryptologist and a founder of public key encryption, about cryptography and ethics.

In this episode Professor William Buchanan OBE talks with Professor Leonard Adleman, from the University of Southern California, about the endurance of RSA, DNA as a computational substrate and the contention between national security and privacy.

In this episode Professor William Buchanan OBE talks with Professor Alan Woodward from University of Surrey about his illustrious career as a Physicist, Consultant, Researcher and Professor.

In this episode Professor William Buchanan OBE is joined by Nick Sullivan, head of research at Cloudflare, to discuss the mathematics of cryptography, public key encryption, and the implications of quantum computing.

In this Episode Professor William Buchanan OBE talks with Federico Charosky about the past, present and future of the information security industry, what it takes to innovate as an entrepreneur and his view on the intersection between industry and academia.