Called TACK, which is short for Trust Assertions for Certificate Keys, was developed by security researchers Trevor Perrin and Moxie Marlinspike and was submitted for consideration to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), the body in charge of TLS, on Wednesday.

TACK tries to resolve the trust-related problems with the public key infrastructure that were highlighted by last year's security breaches at certificate authorities (CAs) Comodo and Diginotar.

Both of those breaches resulted in SSL certificates for high profile domains like google.com, hotmail.com or mail.yahoo.com, being issued fraudulently. In Diginotar's case, the certificates were even employed in active attacks against Google users in Iran.

At the moment, Web browsers trust over 600 organizations from around the world to issue SSL certificates. These organizations are known as certificate authorities and every one of them can technically issue a valid certificate for any domain on the Internet.

Several proposals to improve the current CA-based system have been put forward by Internet and security experts in the past 12 months, but there's no consensus regarding which one offers the best solution.