A distributed no-trust-required timestamping service is fundamentally what Bitcoin provides.
So it would be possible to prove a certificate was issued before a certain time (eg. before a breach at a CA), if CAs were forced to immediately publish, in the Bitcoin block chain, the hash of each newly issued certificate. There would be no need to trust a single (bypassable/hackable) entity doing timestamping, since the block chain itself is distributed.
(This is just one of the numerous applications that distributed block chains enable IMHO! And we are just barely scratching the surface of what we can do with such a concept...)
But the bitcoin blockchain is already too big to store and sync on mobile devices with costly data connections - and it would only get bigger if it had to contain every SSL certificate ever issued!
You could have SSL clients connect to trusted nodes, like mobile bitcoin clients do [1], but then you've basically taken Certificate Authorities and replaced them with 'trusted nodes' so you're not much better off really.
The bitcoin blockchain doesn't need to contain every SSL certificate. It just needs to contain a SINGLE transaction conducted each day where the comment field contains the hash of a document published by the root authority. That document would be published elsewhere (on the site of the owner of the root certificate) -- the bitcoin blockchain would be used only to provide proof that the document hadn't been changed since it was published.
The problem is that distributed block-chains are not a panacea. It requires a certain inertia to increase the difficulty of attacks on the block-chain, and even then attacks are still possible if your pockets are deep enough.
So it would be possible to prove a certificate was issued before a certain time (eg. before a breach at a CA), if CAs were forced to immediately publish, in the Bitcoin block chain, the hash of each newly issued certificate. There would be no need to trust a single (bypassable/hackable) entity doing timestamping, since the block chain itself is distributed.
(This is just one of the numerous applications that distributed block chains enable IMHO! And we are just barely scratching the surface of what we can do with such a concept...)