announcement · July 28, 2026

Introducing Confium

By Confium Project

Introducing Confium

Public Key Infrastructure has a structural weakness: every Certificate Authority holds a single private key that can sign anything. If that key is compromised, every certificate the CA ever issued is called into question.

We’ve watched this happen repeatedly. DigiNotar in 2011. Symantec from 2015 to 2018. Let’s Encrypt revocation events in 2020. Each incident cost millions of dollars, disrupted services, and eroded public trust.

Confium is our answer. An open-source framework for multi-stakeholder threshold cryptography. No single party holds the signing key; a configurable quorum must participate. The same relationship a TLS library has to transport security — a configurable framework organizations deploy with their own parameters.

What ships today

The Confium Rust workspace contains 43 crates organized into three deployment modes:

  • Mode 1 — Peer-to-Peer TC. Nodes do threshold cryptography directly. Hours to value. For MPC, distributed custody, BFT consensus.
  • Mode 2 — PKI Drop-in. Drop-in adapters for PKCS#11 v3.0, OpenSSL 3.0, JCE, and TLS 1.3. Existing PKI consumers keep working — every signature now requires a threshold quorum.
  • Mode 3 — Sovereign PKI. Custom certificate formats for institutions where no single party can be trusted. Sovereign over formats, delegation rules, archival cadence, quorum composition.

All three modes share the same engine, the same threshold protocols (FROST, CMP20, GG18, threshold ElGamal), the same transparency log, the same coordinator. What differs is the integration surface.

Real cryptography

Every threshold protocol crate ships real cryptography, not stubs:

  • confium-tc-frost-ed25519 — real FROST-ed25519 with the full three-round signing protocol.
  • confium-tc-frost-p256 — real P-256 Shamir secret sharing and ECDSA threshold signing.
  • confium-tc-cmp20 — real CMP20 threshold ECDSA.
  • confium-tc-gg18 — real GG18 threshold ECDSA.
  • confium-tc-elgamal-p256 — real threshold ElGamal-P256.

The composite signature crate (confium-composite) supports hybrid classical + PQ signatures — Ed25519 + ECDSA-P256 + ML-DSA-65 verified as one. Post-quantum migration as a software upgrade, not an HSM replacement.

Three bindings

  • Ruby gem (gem install confium) — native extension built via magnus + rb-sys at install time. Full Confium API surface.
  • Rust workspace (cargo add confium-core) — the source of truth.
  • WASM verifier (npm install @confium/confium-wasm) — browser / Node.js verifier for composite signatures, transparency proofs, X.509 / CMS parsing.

Transparency by design

Every signing operation can anchor into an append-only Merkle transparency log implementing RFC 6962 semantics. Inclusion proofs let any verifier independently confirm a certificate is in the log. Consistency proofs make split-view attacks detectable. OpenTimestamps anchoring in Bitcoin provides an irrefutable “what head existed at time T” record.

Three defenses against split-view attacks, layered:

  1. Consistency proofs on every new tree head.
  2. Witness gossip between coordinators (default: hourly).
  3. OTS anchoring of tree heads in Bitcoin (default: daily).

Open source, sustainably funded

BSD-2-Clause licensed. Funded by NLnet NGI Zero PET and Mozilla MOSS. Funders do not direct the technical direction.

Welcome to Confium.

Tags

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