Building Europe’s Public Digital Infrastructure
Flurfunk: Building sovereign network infrastructure in a real-world government agency
<p>Sovereign software in the cloud? Many projects are taking care of that. FOSS services running on servers? Lots of excellent choice.<br />
But what about your office, the place where you work? Is your local network just invisible infrastructure at the mercy of whatever vendor you picked?</p>
<p>This talk will show you how we built and operate the "Flurfunk" network prototype at BSI (German Federal Office for Information Security). Flurfunk is a Proof of Concept wireless and wired network with a sizable number of human users with purely FOSS infrastructure: Routers, Switches, WiFi Access Points and a Certificate Authority, all of them running FOSS firmware, operating systems and services. This whole infrastructure is centrally orchestrated and requires almost zero maintenance.</p>
<p>The magic lies in OpenWrt https://openwrt.org/ (for the network components) and Smallstep step-ca https://smallstep.com/open-source/ combined with OpenSSL https://www.openssl.org/ (for the CA), as well as Debian https://www.debian.org/ , Das U-Boot https://u-boot.org/ and coreboot https://www.coreboot.org/ (behind the scenes).</p>
<p>Yes, the network supports the latest and greatest in authentication standards (WPA3 Enterprise), but it also offers user-friendly setup for users and admins. This includes automated certificate rollout to all centrally managed laptops and smartphones for WLAN access via WPA3 Enterprise. Yes, Flurfunk aims to be CRA compliant ahead of time.</p>
<p>Yes, all components are current off-the-shelf hardware and yes, installing OpenWrt on them is easy (no tools needed).</p>
<p>No, Flurfunk is not a production network nor does it come with support, it's a PoC.</p>
<p>Do you want to stand on the shoulders of giants as we do, and replicate the setup for your own network?
Of course the configuration files for all components as well as links to the relevant firmware/OS images will be provided for download. Where applicable, existing tutorials/wikis have been improved.</p>
Additional information
| Live Stream | https://live.fosdem.org/watch/aw1120 |
|---|---|
| Type | devroom |
| Language | English |
More sessions
| 1/31/26 |
<p>Digital Public Infrastructure is needed for resilient societies in Europe, but not just there: All over the world, government and civil society offer digital services to their constituencies. And increasingly, they have become aware of the risks that come with using infrastructure owned by a few large companies under a jurisdiction that traditionally was not necessarily ranking their interests very high and these days have become rather unpredictable. The judges and employees of the ...
|
| 1/31/26 |
<p><b>Digital public products need sustainable vehicles</b></p> <p>https://www.publiccode.net/public-product-organizations</p> <p>For almost 10 years, the Foundation for Public Code has been working with public administrations and their partners to better develop public digital infrastructure together. Through many collaborations between cities., states, and other public institutions, we have come to realize that all projects that hope to become sustainable implementations in the context of the ...
|
| 1/31/26 |
<p>This roundtable will bring together FOSS product owners and governments to engage in a strategic discussion around two interrelated areas: 1) How to assess the technical maturity using the draft Universal Software Maturity Indicators (v0.1) https://github.com/DPGAlliance/CoP-Maturity-Indicators 20 How to assess institutional readiness of government to adopt, scale, and maintain FOSS projects in the context of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) </p> <p>The discussion will explore how these ...
|
| 1/31/26 |
<p>1 year ago, EU OS put out an architecture for a common Desktop Linux for the public sector. Since then, EU OS had many closed-room conversations with public servants from several member states and with various open source communities. EU OS also published a how-to for a DIY Proof-of-Concept (PoC). This talk explains briefly the vision and PoC of EU OS, gives a summary of the feedback received so far and formulates the public sector expectations on the underlying Linux distribution.</p>
|
| 1/31/26 |
<p>Across Europe, institutions are seeking credible, sovereign, open alternatives to proprietary cloud platforms. France’s public digital agency, DINUM, took a bold step in that direction by developing La Suite, a fully open-source service stack. What is unique is not only the openness of the code, but the ambition: that a public administration can edit and publish digital commons for the public good.</p> <p>But building a commons is only the first step. Ensuring long-term adoption, usability, ...
|
| 1/31/26 |
<p>In late 2023, DINUM (the French Interministerial Digital Directorate) set out to answer a simple question: How do you turn promising national open-source products into shared European products? Two years later, after 2 consortium projects, cross-border hackathons, and several experiments with EU funding mechanisms, we have accumulated a set of practical insights forged through coordination with other EU partners</p> <p>This talk offers an experience-based walkthrough of what worked, what ...
|
| 1/31/26 |
<p>While digital sovereignty is increasingly prompted on European and National levels, the urgency and risks implied have yet to reach the regional and local levels of government. Building robust public digital infrastructure and services on open source foundations have potential both in addressing risks while also providing a substantial economic up-side considering how public digital services are mirrored across regional and local borders. This talk shares insights from a cross-country, ...
|
