Confium + RNP: complementary cryptography

Confium and RNP are sibling projects. They serve complementary roles in the cryptographic stack:

What each does

	Confium	RNP
Focus	Threshold cryptography + transparency logs	Standard OpenPGP (RFC 9580)
Key model	Multi-party (no single party holds the full key)	Single-party (one private key)
Signatures	Composite (hybrid classical + PQ)	Standard OpenPGP signatures
Transparency	RFC 6962 Merkle tree + inclusion/consistency proofs	None
Deployment	Three modes (peer-to-peer TC, PKI drop-in, Sovereign PKI)	Standard PGP keyring

When to use which

• Confium for multi-stakeholder signing, threshold quorums, transparency logs, post-quantum migration, institutional PKI.
• RNP for standard OpenPGP key generation, signing, verification, encryption, armor encode/decode.
• Both when your application uses standard OpenPGP for person-to-person communication AND threshold signing for institutional decisions.

Ruby integration

The Confium Ruby gem includes Confium::OpenPGP — a soft-dependency wrapper that loads ruby-rnp lazily:

require "confium"

# Threshold signing (Confium)
tree = Confium::Transparency::MerkleTree.new
seq = tree.append(artifact_type: :threshold_signature, artifact_hash: hash)

# Standard OpenPGP (RNP via Confium::OpenPGP)
Confium::OpenPGP.verify(pgp_signature, signed_data, pgp_pubkey)

Install both gems:

gem install confium ruby-rnp

Python integration

pip install confium py-rnp

The py-rnp package provides standard OpenPGP operations. Use it alongside confium for a complete Python crypto toolkit.

WASM (browser)

Both projects ship npm packages:

npm install @confium/confium-wasm @rnpgp/rnp

• @confium/confium-wasm — transparency log verification, composite signature verification, attribute predicate evaluation.
• @rnpgp/rnp — full OpenPGP (RFC 9580) in the browser: key management, sign, verify, encrypt, decrypt.

See also

• Confium bindings — install + docs for each binding.
• RNP on GitHub — the RNP C library.
• @rnpgp/rnp on npm — WASM OpenPGP package.