Namecoin, A Replacement For SSL
The problems this author lists with SSL/TLS are not in fact problems with SSL/TLS, but rather with the browser vendors.<p>The TLS standard itself is almost agnostic to how certificates are validated, and there is more than one strategy for doing so. For instance, Chromium doesn't trust the entire TLS CA system; it bakes into the browser "pinned" certificates, and not only won't honor a Google Mail cert from Komodo or China or Trustwave, but will also alert the (large, enthusiastic) security team at Google that a CA issued a rogue certificate.<p>There's no reason the same system couldn't work for your site too; key pinning just needs to be made dynamic. And there's a standard for that: Moxie Marlinspike and Trevor Perrin's TACK, at <a href="http://tack.io" rel="nofollow">http://tack.io</a>. If you want to "fix" TLS, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater: you are vanishingly unlikely to do a better job of designing an encrypted channel than <i>every cryptographer and protocol designer and software security person who has poured time into TLS</i>. Instead, update the browser UX, which is the only thing leaving us hostages to the CA system.