Whalebone, Member of the A1 Start-up Campus, Awarded With Delivery of Pan-European DNS Solution Infrastructure by European Commission

Today, A1 Telekom Austria Group announces that Whalebone, a member of the Viennese A1 Start-up Campus, has been awarded with the building of a pan-European DNS solution infrastructure. The European Union supports the project itself and aims to boost EU tech & DNS related business cases to build up a widely accessible, high performance, resilient and secure infrastructure.

“This is great news for the European telecommunications and technology sector and a fantastic example of how European telcos keep up with their international competitors, particularly in today’s technology sector. The resilience of a national digital infrastructure is of utmost importance and we are on the right path to decrease foreign dependence for critical services. Also, I am very proud that from the beginning we have shown confidence and belief in the capabilities of our A1 start-up Whalbone and the winning of this tender proves us right”, says Alejandro Plater, COO A1 Telekom Austria Group.

“In our proposal, we drafted an architecture that not only runs public resolvers as such but actually counts with Operators being involved in that, with their resolvers, as we believe this is the way to a high penetration of such a service and at the same time keeping a healthy decentralization in place. This will be a fantastic European tech project. We present a clear way how to onboard 100 Mio. citizens to DNS4EU”, says Richard Malovic, CEO at Whalebone.

Under the lead by Whalebone, the bidding consortium consists of 9 consortium members + 4 associated partners in 10 countries joined by: Abi Lab (FinCERT IT), Centro Nacional de Cibersegurança (CERT-PT), CERT Polska, CESNET, CZ.NIC, Czech Technical University Prague, deSec E.v., National Cyber Security Directorate, F-Secure, Ministry of Electronic Governance, Sztaki (CERT.HU) and Time.lex.

Why a consortium

The consortium utilizes the experience from providing DNS level security to public, CSPs & corporates (Whalebone), DNS resolution tech development & maintenance (CZ.NIC), academia (CVUT/CTU) and safeguarding the national internet landscape (CERTs/CSIRTs). The involvement of profit and non-profit organizations from multiple countries secures a balanced governance, stability and reliability.The design is set to run long-term with strong multisource financing background. It is cost-efficient thanks to experience brought by industry-relevant partners. The aim is to deliver a multi-local security platform immediately acting and protecting the EU citizens.

Note to the Editor

The Domain Name System, or DNS for short, is also known as the "telephone directory of the Internet". Similar to searching for a name in a telephone directory to get the telephone number, one looks in the DNS for a computer name to get the corresponding IP address. The IP address is needed to establish a connection to a server about which only the computer name is known.

DNS4EU is the name of a European Union initiative intended to exert more control over the DNS within Europe, aimed specifically at the current level of use of open resolvers in the EU. As Andrew Campling reported in January 2022, “The European Commission announced its intention to support the development of a new European DNS resolver (“DNS4EU”) in December 2020. It has been in dialogue since then to refine its thinking, in particular placing much greater emphasis on the potential cybersecurity benefits that could arise from the deployment of the resolver.”