SSL certificates are a way to prove the identity of the owner of a public key. SSL Certificates Publicly Prove The Identity of the Public Key Owner. The current implementation of the protocol used to secure web applications is TLS (Transport Layer Security) The story of SSL and TLS is rich of events and spans 25 years since its inception by Taher Elgamal at Netscape. X.509 is the ITU-T standard used to represent certificates, and has been chosen to be the standard used in the TLS protocol.