On Mon, Sep 9, 2013 at 6:05 AM, Michael Orlitzky <michael@orlitzky.com> wrote:

The CA infrastructure was never secure. It exists to transfer money away

from website owners and into the bank accounts of the CAs and browser
makers. Security may be one of their goals, but it's certainly not the
motivating one.

Well, at least CAcert doesn't exist for money.

To avoid a tirade here, I've already written about this:

[1]
http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/in_defense_of_self-signed_certificates.php

[2]
http://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/why_im_against_ca-signed_certificates.php

I've got a question about Gentoo in this case. If we assume that stage3 is trusted, does portage check that mirrors are trusted? I'm not sure about this. But if it does, then distfiles checksums are also checked, so they are trusted, too. In this case you could trust a running browser. Until your system becomes compromised in other ways.

This would be OS packaging system problem, not the problem with CA-->user trust model.