Can Bitcoin technology be leveraged to implement a decentralized trust system (i.e. a replacement to SSL)? Like Namecoin is intended to replace / augment DNS, can the Bitcoin principles / protocol be extended to support a distributed "trust" mechanism, in a way that no central authority will need to be trusted in order to verify public key authenticity?

This post is inspired by the recent hack of a Certificate Authority.

Clarification - I don't mean for this technology to be integrated within the main client or blockchain, just for the underlying technology to be used.
While it's certainly possible to implement a script to handle trust the way NameCoin handles DNS-like transactions there are a few possible "weak links" in such a system. First, since an individual can't usually be known the trust could only be tied to individual addresses, which would encourage the re-use of addresses and thus decrease the anonymity of the network as a whole since merchants would want to find ways to get around generating a new address for each transaction in order to maximize their trust rating. The only alternative is to implement a system of binding multiple addresses into one trusted "account" which would further compromise anonymity by making it known precisely who owns which addresses thereby tying at least one side of most Bitcoin transactions to a real person.

In short, it's possible but it kills the pseudonymous nature of the network and makes transactions far too traceable to real identities. It could be implemented, but given the private (and disruptive) nature of most Bitcoin proponents it's unlikely that it will be. An external "Web of Trust" type system carries adequate benefits without compromising Bitcoin itself and in fact, there has been a great deal of discussion on how to decentralize them.