About
A web of trust is a concept used in PGP, GnuPG, and other OpenPGP-compatible systems to establish the authenticity of the binding between a public key and its owner.
It decentralizes authentication of public keys by a central mechanism, and substitutes individual endorsements of the link between user and public key.
Its decentralized trust model is an alternative to the centralized trust model of a public key infrastructure (PKI), which relies exclusively on a certificate authority (or a hierarchy of such).
certificate authority structure:
- PGP