You wrote: > Of the two major alternatives, the CA system ... and the web of trust ..., of these, the former is clearly more reliable. That is, you wrote "the

You wrote: > Of the two major alternatives, the CA system ... and the web of trust ..., of these, the former is clearly more reliable. That is, you wrote "the CA system is more reliable than the WoT". I'm pretty sure you didn't mean what you wrote. It seems to contradict the rest of your post. Elaborating for the benefit of other readers: we have lots of evidence that the Certificate Authority system has been repeatedly compromised, certainly by state actors and probably also by (other) criminals. There are semi-solutions, like certificate pinning. One alternative (the only alternative I know of) is not trusting any Authority to get good certs, but rather getting them yourself, or from people you trust, or from people trusted by people you trust, etc... thus the Web of Trust. This alternative is pretty poor, but it might be less broken than CAs.