The full upstream README, mirrored here for reference. Install config, tool schemas, adoption signals, and an original overview live on the Conarium listing page.
The Third Eye for Your Company's Data.
A self-hosted, governed gateway that lets AI coding assistants (Cursor, Copilot, Claude) touch your real data under a policy you write—protected values masked before they leave. When a receipt sink is configured it writes a signed, independently verifiable receipt of every access it mediates; conarium-init sets that sink, so the default layout does.
The site lives at conarium.dev; this repository is the product.
Nothing below has to be taken on trust. There is a live receipt chain; verify it against its public key on your own machine, with no account and no data of yours:
Exit code 0. The three receipts are one ordinary read, one where five email addresses and a card number were masked before the model saw them, and one refusal. Change any field and the recomputed hash stops matching the stored one — exit 10. Change the signature instead — exit 13.
The verifier is a single file that imports nothing from the package it is checking, so a compromised Conarium cannot talk it into a passing result. Note that it volunteers what it did not check, in the first line of its own output, before the good news.
What this repository has not done is in LIMITATIONS.md (Türkçe). The dated comparison page is conarium.dev/compare.html — that is the only copy; this repo does not keep a second one.
draft-dogru-scitt-disclosure-evidence
is an individual submission. Not adopted by an IETF working group, and it
carries no formal standing — an Internet-Draft is a dated public record, not a standard.
It is published so the receipt format can be implemented without us.
Source files live in standards/.
Point Cursor or Copilot at a production database and it drinks the raw stream—SSNs, credit cards, salaries, and live keys. One rogue prompt can expose your most sensitive tables. Security teams simply can't allow that.
Conarium acts as a high-performance MCP (Model Context Protocol) Proxy. It sits directly between the AI Assistant and your databases, evaluating policies in milliseconds to enforce row limits and mask PII (Personally Identifiable Information) on the wire.
The AI gets the context it needs to write code; the values your policy protects are masked before they reach it. Masking hides a value — it does not make it unlearnable, and where a request language allows predicates over a protected column, an allowed query can still answer questions about one. protectedColumns is the narrower answer to that, and the limit is stated in LIMITATIONS.md rather than left for you to discover.
[MASKED_PII] / [MASKED_SECRET]) before the model sees a single character.secrets and financials tables stay invisible.conarium-coverage), plus two-sided reconciliation against the database's own query counters (conarium-reconcile) — DB-recorded activity that no receipt covers is surfaced instead of staying invisible.disclosure.hash). Saying your data never leaves at all would be the wrong claim: releasing a governed disclosure to an assistant is the job. The gateway makes exactly one outbound request that is not yours: at startup it asks the public npm registry whether a newer version exists, and prints one line to stderr if so. It sends nothing about you — no identifier, no config, no counts — and a remote gateway nobody looks at for weeks is the reason it exists at all. Disable it with CONARIUM_NO_UPDATE_CHECK=1, or point it at your internal mirror with CONARIUM_NPM_REGISTRY. It has a 2-second timeout and never blocks or fails startup. We list it here because a governance product that makes an undisclosed outbound connection has already lost the argument.Conarium can emit portable receipts (Art. 12 / 19 shaped) that a third party verifies offline with a single file — no Conarium install required.
Official claim (do not widen): A Conarium Receipt proves that the records
still in the file have not been altered, reordered, or backdated after they
were created, and that none were removed from the middle of the chain
(prevHash / seq). It does not prove they were correct at the moment of
creation. It also cannot, by itself, prove that records were not dropped from
the end: a shorter leftover chain is still internally consistent. Catching
tail truncation needs a pin from outside the file — --expect-count,
--expect-last-hash, an OpenTimestamps anchor, or conarium-reconcile against
the database's own counters.
(TR) Conarium Makbuzu, dosyada hâlâ duran kayıtların oluşturulduktan sonra değiştirilmediğini, ortadan silinmediğini, yeniden sıralanmadığını ve geriye dönük tarihlenmediğini kanıtlar. Oluşturma anında doğru olduğunu kanıtlamaz. Sondan kesmeyi tek başına göremez: kalan zincir tutarlıdır, yalnızca kısadır. (/TR)
A second verifier, Go and the standard library only, is in verifiers/go. go build -o conarium-verify . then the same arguments as conarium-verify; test-vectors/ is the contract.
Anchoring is a separate step. Stamp a document with npx conarium-stamp <file>,
or submit a chain-head hash with npx conarium-anchor-service.
CONARIUM_ANCHOR_SINK=opentimestamps selects the in-tree calendar client those
tools use; it does not stamp receipts as they are written. Upgrade pending
proofs later with npx conarium-anchor-upgrade ./audit.jsonl.anchors.jsonl.
The client is in-tree (Node crypto + calendar HTTPS). It does not install
javascript-opentimestamps. See LIMITATIONS.md.
Masking that is correct for an AI agent is wrong for the person who owns the data. The owner asking "which customer owes the most" needs the name; the assistant summarising revenue does not. Answering that with a global on/off switch would disable the product's only real guarantee, so masking resolves per person:
Deliberately narrow, because this is the one feature that can loosen protection:
maskColumns, maxRows and maskLabelledNames — and
nothing else. Table, tool and connector permissions stay global; a profile can
never widen what is reachable, only what is legible within it.
protectedColumns is not overlayable: a profile that could drop it would be a
per-person back door.policy.detectors.mrz: false
on the base policy opts it out. IP addresses are off until
policy.detectors.ip: true. Name masking is the one detector a profile can
switch off (maskLabelledNames: false), because the controller reading their
own customer list is the case this feature exists for.policy.id becomes
conarium.policy/<profile>, inside the signed hash. An access made under a
relaxed profile cannot later be presented as having been fully masked. This is
what keeps the audit story honest: the point was never "nobody sees PII", it is
"every access is governed, and the evidence says under which rules."Every other identifier has a shape. An email has an @, a national ID has a
checksum, a card has a length — a regex decides, and the decision reproduces.
A name has no shape, so maskColumns was the only thing catching one, and a name
typed into a free-text note reached the model verbatim.
Two deterministic passes close the part of that gap that can be closed honestly:
| Pass | What triggers it | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Carry-over | The value is one this policy already masks in some column | customer_name is masked, so note: "Ayşe Demir called" is masked too — including across rows |
| Labelled | The text itself marks it: a title or a field label | Sn. Ahmet Yılmaz, Yetkili: Ayşe Demir, customer: John Smith |
What this does not do, deliberately: a bare name in running prose is not detected. "Ahmet called yesterday" goes through. Catching that needs NER — a model, a dictionary and a confidence score — and every decision this gateway makes is meant to be reproducible from the rule alone, by someone who does not trust us. A probabilistic masker would also be a probabilistic receipt. Tools that do run NER (Presidio-based ones, for instance) cover more entity types; they buy that with a confidence threshold. Neither position dominates — this one is stated so an auditor knows which one they are holding.
Still not caught by content scanners — by design, not by omission: street
addresses and bare names. An address detector cannot tell "Atatürk Caddesi No:15"
from "Atatürk Barajı" without a gazetteer. A name detector cannot tell Deniz /
Güneş / Umut from the words. Both would need a dictionary or a model; this
gateway's decisions are deterministic. Close those gaps with maskColumns (column
names) and conarium-suggest-policy (a name-based guess that does not write
your config).
IP addresses are caught when you turn them on (policy.detectors.ip: true).
They are off by default: a server IP is not always personal data, and a mask you
cannot disable breaks SOC work. 1.2.3.4 is structurally a valid IPv4 address;
when the detector is on it is masked, even if you meant a version number. Dates
(13.08.2026) and amounts (1.250,00) are not IPv4.
Passport numbers in free text are not caught. MRZ is: two TD3 lines × 44
characters, P in position 1, 7-3-1 check digits. A checksum miss is not an MRZ
and is left alone. TD1/TD2 are not implemented.
HTML @ / @, JSON \u0040, and %40 are masked when they sit inside
an email-shaped token. A lone 5@ store or C:\path\u0040abc is left alone.
One decode pass; &#64; is not chased.
A TCKN split across two similarly named fields on the same row (tckn_1 /
tckn_2) is masked when the concatenation checksums. Unrelated columns are not
combined.
Zero-width characters, fullwidth digits / @, and unicode dashes are stripped
or mapped to ASCII before the detectors — that pass is not a general encoding
decoder; wrapped base64/hex tokens inside a field are masked only when they
decode to an existing detector hit.
Scan length. A single text field longer than policy.scanCharCap (default
16 384; env CONARIUM_SCAN_CHAR_CAP overrides) is replaced with [MASKED_PII]
as a whole, even when it contains no identifier. The scanner is not skipped:
skipping would mean a long note, JSON blob, or log line is the way past masking.
This is a usability setting. Raising it grows scan cost quadratically — a
40 KB alphanumeric field was ~1 s on the unbounded email regex before that regex
was bounded. maskedCount records that a decision was made.
Carry-over ignores values under three characters (a two-character value matches
everywhere and would shred the output) and matches on Unicode word boundaries, so
Ali is masked in Ali onayladı but not inside Kalite.
Receipts prove what went through the gateway. Reconciliation asks the database what it saw, and compares:
Neither command invents its inputs and conarium-init does not create them, so
both answer 20 (input missing) until you have produced them: declaration.json
is your own period-and-scope statement (docs/RECEIPT-SPEC.md
names the fields), and the two snapshots come from
scripts/pg-snapshot.sql.
The language is deliberate: absence is reported as "access NOT RECORDED" / "not receipted", never "no access occurred" — an absent record is ambiguous by nature, and a tool that pretends otherwise is lying to its auditor.
Run against our own production ERP the day it shipped, including a real bypass we
performed on ourselves and the tool caught:
docs/dogfood/2026-08-06-reconcile.md.
Full schema, exit codes, and known gaps: docs/RECEIPT-SPEC.md.
Receipts prove what went through the gateway. Reconciliation proves nothing went around it. Both are yours, self-hosted, and signed by your own key — which is exactly what an auditor discounts: you kept the record, you signed it, and you stored it. A countersignature answers that by putting a second party on the same chain head.
The service is in this package, so you can run your own and sign your own heads — useful for a second internal custodian, and pointless against the objection above. What makes it worth anything is that the signer is not you.
The log is a hash chain: entries are appended, never rewritten, and an OTS
timestamp covers the head rather than each submission. What a countersignature
proves — and, just as importantly, what it does not — is written out in
docs/COUNTERSIGN.md, together with what a leaked
signing key would cost.
Pro is the hosted countersignature — someone other than you signs the chain head. $20/month or $200/year — save $40. One period, not a subscription. It does not renew by itself — when the period ends, access ends and you can buy it again. 14-day no-questions refund; after that, no partial refunds. VAT added where applicable. Checkout is not open yet: conarium.dev/buy redirects to the waitlist form until the payment path goes live, so these terms are the published price rather than something you can pay for today. The binary above is what you run yourself; Pro is the second signer. Shipped in the package since 0.2.16; the VERAX-operated endpoint is not open to customers yet. Business stays on the waitlist: scheduled reconciliation, coverage alerts and the signed period report are in the contract, not shipped yet.
The receipt is meant to outlive this implementation, so it ships with
conformance vectors — thirteen frozen cases plus a machine-readable manifest in
test-vectors/:
Point your own verifier at each receipts.jsonl, pass the arguments listed in
manifest.json, and compare the exit code. expected-hashes.json gives the
canonical JCS → SHA-256 hashes so you can check your canonicalisation without
needing our private key, which is deliberately not published.
The vectors found two things in this repository on their first run: a schema check that reported a structurally invalid receipt as tampered, and a wrong assumption of ours about unsigned receipts. Both are now frozen as cases 007 and 008.
conarium-stamp anchors a file to the OpenTimestamps calendars, and
conarium-anchor-upgrade fills in the Bitcoin block height once it lands.
Those two are all most setups need.
If you would rather expose anchoring as a small service — for several
gateways, or to hand an auditor a stable URL —
bin/conarium-anchor-service.mjs is one:
it submits hashes, retains proofs, serves the raw .ots at a permanent path,
and upgrades pending anchors on a timer.
It is code you run, not a service we operate — there is no hosted instance to sign up for. It also serves the raw proof precisely so a third party can verify with the reference OpenTimestamps client and ignore the service entirely. An anchoring endpoint you have to trust would defeat the purpose of anchoring.
Signing is fail-closed: set CONARIUM_AUDIT_SIGNING_KEY and/or
CONARIUM_AUDIT_HMAC_KEY, or explicitly CONARIUM_AUDIT_UNSIGNED=1 for throwaway setups.
Key rotation: keep prior public PEMs in CONARIUM_AUDIT_TRUST_PUBKEYS (, / ;
separated). After the first signed audit line, every later line must carry sig.
Conarium is not the first project to produce signed, verifiable receipts for AI activity. Acta, Emilia Protocol, AuthProof, Agent Receipts and Invariant SVR all do a form of this, and some are ahead of us on standardisation — Acta and Emilia both have IETF Internet-Drafts. Related research: Aegon (arXiv 2604.06693), Decentralised Trust Layers (ACM Web Conf 2026), and ISO/IEC TS 27560:2023 for signed consent records.
Those receipts attest to what an agent did. A Conarium receipt attests to what the model was prevented from seeing — because the component that masks the data is the same component that signs the record. Enforcement and evidence are one part here, not two systems that have to be reconciled.
What we will defend: Conarium is the only implementation we are aware of that combines all three of (1) inline enforcement (policy + masking), (2) a portable, offline-verifiable receipt of that enforcement, and (3) coverage reconciliation — checking the database's own query counters against the receipt chain, so access that bypassed the gateway is surfaced instead of staying invisible. Signing receipts without enforcing is common; enforcing without portable receipts is common; reconciling both sides against the data source's own bookkeeping is the part we have not found elsewhere. Measured end to end on a real operating company's live ERP — 121,374 records, 121,366 identities masked, 485,496 fields masked, zero leaked to the model (Governance Report 001).
What that number is, and what it is not. It comes from a batch run against our own company's ERP, and what backs it is a hash-chained audit file of 123 lines whose arithmetic you can re-add yourself and whose chain was re-verified 17 days later. What does not back it is a receipt chain: that run emitted audit entries, not signed portable receipts, and its actor is a batch service identity, not a person. So if you ask "show me the receipts for those 485,496 fields", the honest answer is that they do not exist — the receipt chain is a separate and much smaller measurement. Scale and offline verifiability are two different claims here, and we would rather draw that line ourselves than have you find it. The mechanism is verifiable without trusting us; this particular figure is our own measurement, and Governance Report 001 lists its limits.
That claim is hedged on purpose, and docs/PRIOR-ART.md is the
evidence behind it: eleven projects — ten checked on 6 August 2026 and Vaara added
on 19 August — what each one has, the closest academic prior art
(Sello / Notarized Agents, which names this
gap better than we did), and nine things we could not verify. If you know of an
implementation combining all three, open an issue and it will be corrected.
⚠️ The Vaara row narrowed this claim rather than confirming it. That project specifies a coverage reconciliation in its design documents; a search of its tree found no code running it, so the row reads "specified, not found implemented". The idea is not ours alone — the running code, as far as this scan reaches, still is, and the file says so above its own table.
Conarium operates on a strict tripartite architecture, balancing power between three pillars:
Step 3 is not decoration. A missing config file does not stop the gateway —
it starts with zero connectors and governs nothing — and a connector that fails
to connect is logged, not raised. conarium-doctor names both, exits 1 when
something is wrong so it can gate a deployment, and never prints a secret, so
its output is safe to paste into an issue.
conarium-init refuses to overwrite existing files unless you pass --force.
It never prints the private key — only its path.
The policy editor is npx conarium-console. It still binds 127.0.0.1 and
still requires a token. These two commands only add a door on the desktop:
| Windows | .lnk on the desktop (console window minimized) |
| macOS | ~/Applications/Conarium Console.app |
| Linux | ~/.local/share/applications/conarium-console.desktop |
Double-click starts the same console, waits until the port is listening, then
opens your browser. The token is not put in the URL; a one-time nonce (≤30s)
is exchanged for a session cookie. If a shortcut with that name already exists,
a -2 suffix is used instead of overwriting.
Export CONARIUM_CONSOLE_TOKEN before --install-shortcut so the launcher
can read it from ~/.conarium/console.token (created 0600). The shortcut
file itself does not contain the token.
The shortcut uses assets/conarium-mark.ico / .icns / -512.png,
all from the same SVG. If those files are missing the shortcut is still
created and the command warns.
The console Makbuzlar tab lists signed receipts from audit.receiptSink
(newest first) and shows the same receipt HTML as demo.conarium.dev/proof.
It verifies the hash chain and writes zincir sağlam or kırık (satır N).
If the sink is empty or unset, it says so — it does not invent a sample
receipt. Audit Logs remain the unsigned playground trail; they are not receipts.
When the package is on npm, the same binaries will ship in the tarball
(conarium-init, conarium-doctor, conarium-verify, conarium-suggest-policy).
Until then, run them from this repository as above.
conarium-doctor checks the things that fail quietly. Two of them matter most:
a missing config file does not stop the gateway — it starts with zero
connectors and governs nothing — and a connector that cannot connect is logged,
not raised, so the process looks healthy while serving nothing. The doctor also
catches the missing <pubkey>.keyid sidecar, which makes every receipt verify as
13 (reads like tampering, isn't).
It exits 0 when clean and 1 when something is wrong, so it can gate a
deployment. It never prints a secret — passwords, tokens and key material are
reported as shape only (postgresql://appuser@db.internal:5432/prod (password set, not shown)), which means the output is safe to paste into an issue or an
email.
Conarium speaks MCP over stdio, so your AI assistant launches it as a command. Add this to your MCP client config (e.g. Cursor):
Control access using a simple conarium.json policy file:
Anything not in allowTables is denied by default; matched maskColumns are redacted to [MASKED_PII] before the data ever reaches the model.
protectedColumns uses the same glob syntax. Every pattern is also masked in
the result. In addition, that column may not appear in a predicate (WHERE,
HAVING, JOIN … ON, ORDER BY, GROUP BY) or a derived SELECT expression
— the query is refused. A bare SELECT email is still allowed and comes back
masked. Omit the field and behaviour is unchanged. A profile cannot set it.
mssql / oracle refuse to boot if the field is non-empty: those gates cannot
walk predicate positions, and this product does not claim a rule it cannot
enforce.
policy.dialect selects the SQL gate the query tool uses: postgres (omitted default), mssql, or oracle. It is the operator's declaration — Conarium does not guess the dialect from the statement. A typo or mysql rejects the config.
Connectors are fail-closed.
allowConnectorsis a strict allow-list: if it is missing or empty, no connector is permitted (previously an empty list meant "allow all"). If you configure connectors, you must list them here — otherwise the server refuses to start and tells you exactly which field to add.denyConnectorsstill takes precedence overallowConnectors.
policy.detectors and policy.scanCharCapIdentity detectors — TCKN, card, IBAN, email — cannot be switched off. A config
that tries (detectors: { tckn: false }) is rejected at load. That is the
product: masking that a bank can disable from a JSON file is not masking.
| Key | Default | Why |
|---|---|---|
detectors.ip | false | A server IP is not always personal data. A mask with no off switch breaks SOC ("how many requests from this address?"). Opt in when the column really is a client address. |
detectors.mrz | true | A passport MRZ is identity and has check digits. Turn off on the base policy if you do not handle travel documents. |
scanCharCap | 16384 | Usability. Fields longer than this are replaced whole ([MASKED_PII]), never skipped. Env CONARIUM_SCAN_CHAR_CAP overrides. Raise it and scan cost grows quadratically. Ceiling 1 048 576. |
policy.customPatternsFormats the built-in detectors do not know — a bank customer number, a
house account code — can be registered as extra rules on the same
scanner. This is not a second masking path and it does not replace
maskColumns.
Each rule needs a name (what the receipt records), a pattern, optional
column globs, and a mask label. An optional sample is what conarium-doctor
tries the compiled pattern against — compile success is not a catch. A
broken or ReDoS-shaped pattern rejects the config; the pattern and the
sample are never written to logs, receipts, or doctor output.
Quantifiers must be bounded ({8}, {4,12}). +, *, nested groups and
lookaround are rejected at load. A rule names a format you already know;
it does not invent one.
conarium-suggest-policy --sql schema.sql prints a maskColumns guess from
column names (*name*, *address*, *tckn*, …). It does not write your
config. The first line of the output says so.
Conarium is early access — and honest about what's real:
Shipping now: governed MCP gateway (stdio + HTTP) · deterministic PII masking,
including labelled names in free text · allow/deny + row caps · per-person masking
profiles · tamper-evident hash-chained audit ledger · Ed25519-signed receipt per access
once a receipt sink is configured, with an offline verifier · signed coverage
declarations · two-sided reconciliation
against the database's own counters · OpenTimestamps anchoring and an optional
anchoring service · conformance vectors · SQL gate: Postgres, Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle
(MySQL is not implemented; Oracle synonyms and database links are not resolved — see LIMITATIONS) · Postgres, Supabase, docs, OpenAPI, Jira
and Slack connectors · conarium-init / conarium-doctor via npx (@conarium-ai/core).
Next: consent binding (spec published, no code — patent review first) · a second independent implementation of the receipt format · per-user identity bound to an identity provider rather than an operator token map.
Deliberately not planned, so nobody waits for it:
Code-Review score of 0, because pull requests
here are merged without a second approver.Known gaps: LIMITATIONS.md, the README above,
docs/RECEIPT-SPEC.md,
docs/BENCHMARK.md, and
docs/API-STABILITY.md.
MIT — all of it, including the verifier, the reconciliation tooling and the anchoring service. There is no feature held back for a paid tier; the code is MIT. What conarium.dev sells is a second signer (Pro) and, later, operated coverage (Business — not shipped yet) — not access to code.