So what is wrong with shared ssl / gpg keys? You could establish your own web of trust with local peers and grow a web that one could traverse to find someone w

So what is wrong with shared ssl / gpg keys? You could establish your own web of trust with local peers and grow a web that one could traverse to find someone who "friends" a foreign public key you want. Since you can get all the keys from all your trusted peers up through that person, you can establish a secure link. The only problem is getting that first key into the network, like is the issue with all man in the middle and cert attacks. But I think it is more reasonable to get a physical copy of a key (or get it over a lan where nobody can intercept or manipulate) over a local net. For example, I imagine Linux distros could include the public keys to sign network communications the same way they sign packages. Microsoft could have centralized easily exploited public keys by governments for their OS, but that is what you sign up for. You link into a massive web of trust sharing public keys but never private ones, and nobody except the endpoints can decrypt it, and you have no public trusted certs to exploit (everyone is a certificate authority). You would have to use a web of confidence approach like bitcoin, where you confirm against multiple peers the validity of a provided public key until you have a satisfactory confidence threshold if you want to be really thorough.