There are no user registrations taking place or sensitive informations. It's just binaries.
[1] http://www.gpg4win.org/package-integrity.html
[2] http://www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/authenticity-is-broken-in-s...
A distributed system that verifies identity would be much better. For example, namecoin based identities and checksums committed to the blockchain.
In fact, any self-signed public key system with a MAC distributed to many sources would be good enough. It doesn't have to have proof of work. The only requirement is that there are enough root CAs that you can't compromise them all.
This should be taken care of by browsers themselves!
I wrote this 3 years ago and since then nothing has been done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024164
I think there is movement on this type of system, but it's slow because people don't realize just how insecure HTTPS is when CAs and the US government are involved.
Now, the fact that people are more inclined to trust the bundled ca keys, rather than a web-of-trust backed pgp key is generally just because people don't understand trust.
Say, if you're in Thailand[1] and require a secure way to communicate, where do you get your os/browser-bundled ca keys? Do you trust a CA that is under influence of the Thai government? Under influence of a sympathetic government?
Do you really trust all the CA keys bundled with your os/browser/phone? Do you know which they are? If not, please don't spread FUD wrt web-of-trust based trust models.
To be clear, both have a bootstrap problem -- but only web-of-trust offers a reasonable way for the individual to ensure proper trust chains. No trust chain is (by definition) without trust, so no model (ca or wot) is immune to being betrayed. But at least wot is designed for the user to be able to influence (and be aware of) trust -- and for easy auditing (most keys are personal, or anchored to personal ids, while it can often be hard to tell who are able to access ca keys and sign possibly rogue certs).
[1] http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/thai-police-we-ll-get-you-for-j...
If you were distributing packages over HTTP and distributing the verification signatures over a secure channel, I'd agree (this is similar to what Debian does[0]). But using one insecure channel to verify another doesn't provide you with any more security.
Furthermore, using SSL provides an additional layer of privacy - the path of the URL (everything after the domain) is hidden to eavesdroppers. They can tell which server you're accessing, but they can't tell which resources you're trying to access[1].
[0] Debian signs the packages (GPG, I believe), and the public keys for these signatures are distributed in the ISO that is used to install the base system. So the validity of the signatures is as trustworthy as the ISO used to install the entire OS (which is hopefully very trustworthy, or else there's a much bigger problem!).
[1] It's for this reason alone that I still wish Debian would distribute packages over SSL even though the GPG signatures provide more security in the authenticity of the packages than SSL would provide.
Yeah Raspian (debian's RPi clone) used GnuPG to check precompiled package signatures.
sorry, my bad.
I suppose in theory one could take a snapshot of CA keys, sign them with pgp and use that a s "know set" (note: not known good, as there is no way to be able to fully trust all the certs typically supplied as CA roots -- a subset could probably be verified). But that's not how the CA system is designed.