Confium, the PKI the certificates ride

Confium is the threshold-cryptography PKI the Primmel SMART platform’s certificates ride: a certificate’s signing key exists only as shares held by multiple stakeholders, so no single party can sign , or forge, or lose, a certificate alone. It is a component of the platform, adopted for its certificate operations.

What threshold cryptography buys

A conventional PKI concentrates trust in one CA key: whoever holds it is the authority, and losing it, to theft, to failure, to a single compelled signer, breaks every certificate it ever issued. Confium splits the key across stakeholders and requires a threshold of them to sign:

• No single point of compromise, an attacker who breaches one party holds shares, not a key.
• No single point of loss, the key survives losing a share holder; the threshold still signs.
• No unilateral issuance, a certificate exists only because the declared quorum produced it, which is precisely the property a certification scheme wants its certificates to have.

Confium is Ribose’s multi-stakeholder threshold-cryptography framework, program-agnostic by design. Its three modes cover peer-to-peer threshold operations, a threshold replacement for conventional PKI, and threshold-certificate PKI, the mode the platform’s certificate machinery uses.

How the platform uses it

The platform’s certificates are machine-readable documents whose every claim names its evidence, signed over Confium (ECDSA P-256 XMLDSig, with a check pipeline any verifier can run). Each program names its own certificate format on Confium, OIML SMART’s is CNML, the Certificat Numérique de Métrologie Légale an issuing authority issues for a certified measuring instrument. The format belongs to the program; the threshold PKI underneath it is Confium.

Links

• The Confium site, www.confium.org.
• The platform page, the Primmel SMART platform, where Confium sits among the platform’s components.