2 years ago an expert in SSL security - Moxie Marlinspike - proposed an alternative to CA's - notaries, a kind of reversed certificate authority. the project is called convergence. It hasn't taken off yet, but the idea is very much worth pondering.
https://github.com/moxie0/Convergencedefcon talk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDmj_xe7EIQDiscussion with Whitefield Diffie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lt7uW6vDk00Contrary to the beliefs of some bitcoin core developers I think CA's are thoroughly broken, and the use of them makes bitcoin worse, not better. SSL was a quick hack by a netscape engineer 20 years ago.