Government identity

National identity systems — eID cards, passports, driver’s licenses, visa stamps — are the most consequential PKI deployments in existence. A compromised root key lets an attacker forge identity for millions of citizens; a sub-CA compromise lets them forge specific identity classes. The standard defense is operational security around the root key, often with HSMs in physically secured facilities.

Confium offers a structural defense: split the root signing authority across multiple government agencies, ministries, or independent overseers. No single agency can issue identity certificates alone; any issuance requires a configured quorum.

When to choose this use case

  • You operate a national identity system and the root signing authority is too sensitive to entrust to any single agency.
  • You need cross-ministry governance (Interior + Foreign Affairs + independent oversight body) for identity issuance.
  • You’re deploying a sovereign digital identity framework (eIDAS Qualified Trust Service, national eID, etc.).
  • You want public verifiability of identity issuance decisions.

How Confium solves it

A Mode 3 (Sovereign PKI) deployment with:

  • Custom certificate profile matching the national identity schema (X.509 with custom extensions, or a custom ASN.1 / CBOR structure).
  • Attribute-based quorum specifying which agencies must participate. Example: “2-of-3 Interior + 1-of-2 Foreign Affairs
    • 1-of-1 Oversight“.
  • Transparency log recording every identity certificate ever issued. Citizens, relying parties, and journalists can audit.
  • OTS anchoring for irrefutable proof of when certificates existed.
Defense in depth against split-view attacks: consistency proofs, witness gossip, OTS anchoring. ADVERSARY MUST DEFEAT ALL THREE 1 Consistency proofs RFC 6962 §2.1.2 — every new tree head extends the previous one. Defeats: silent rewriting of history. 2 Witness gossip Coordinators share heads periodically; witnesses detect divergence. Defeats: log presenting different views to different verifiers. 3 OTS anchoring in Bitcoin Tree heads timestamped in Bitcoin blockchain — irrefutable time proof. Defeats: adversary who controls log AND all witnesses. REMAINING ATTACK COST ≥ CONTROLLING BITCOIN HISTORY

Sovereignty over formats

National identity cards have unique requirements:

  • Custom data fields (national ID number, biometric hash, blood type, organ donor status).
  • Custom encoding (CBOR for compactness on smartcards, or ASN.1 for X.509 compatibility).
  • Custom delegation (Ministry X can issue category Y but not category Z).
  • Custom archival cadence (decades-long validity for passports).

Confium’s Mode 3 lets the deploying government define all of these. The framework provides the engine; the policy and format are sovereign.

Cross-border interop

Many identity systems must interop across borders:

  • eIDAS (EU): cross-border recognition of national eIDs.
  • ICAO (passports): Machine Readable Travel Documents (MRTD).
  • ISO/IEC 18013 (driver’s licenses): mobile driver’s license (mDL).

Confium produces standard X.509 / CMS / CBOR structures that interop with existing verifiers. The threshold-signing backend is invisible to relying parties.

Example: visa stamping

A visa issuance authority wants 2-of-3 sign-off on every visa:

  • Consular officer at the issuing embassy.
  • Home-country foreign ministry.
  • Destination-country immigration authority (for reciprocal agreements).
[quorum]
threshold = 2
total = 3

[[signers]]
id = "consular-officer"
attributes = { role = "consular", embassy = "...", country = "..." }

[[signers]]
id = "foreign-ministry"
attributes = { role = "ministry", country = "..." }

[[signers]]
id = "destination-immigration"
attributes = { role = "immigration", country = "..." }

Each visa is anchored in the transparency log. Any verifier (airline, border control) can independently confirm the visa was validly issued.

Compliance

  • eIDAS Qualified Trust Service: P-384+ jurisdictional policy; audit trail; long-term verifiability via ERS archival.
  • ICAO PKI: X.509 + custom visa extensions; threshold signing at the visa root.
  • FIPS 140-2/3: route through FIPS-validated crypto plugin.

See also