SSL and CAs

The CA model of SSL has always bothered me. The idea of a trusted third party feels eerily close to maffia security: you believe this person, whom you don't know, is who he claims he is on nothing more than the word of this other person, whom you also don't know.

The DigiNotar story proves how problematic this model is, but you don't really need that to understand its problems.

For the longest time, however, there simply was no better way to properly do these things. But now that we have DNSSEC, do we really still need CAs? Really? Can't we just store a fingerprint of a per-domain signing key in the forward (and, possibly, reverse) DNS zone of the host in question, have that signed by DNSSEC, and have the browser check the full DNS chain of the zones in question in addition to the signature on the certificate instead?

I'm sure the CA business people would hate to see that happening, but really, paying someone so they say whatever you tell them to say? Try that in court, and they'd lock you up.

Update: It's called the DANE protocol. No, that has nothing to do with Denmark: DANE stands for "DNS-based Authentication of Named Entities".