The Restena Foundation's DNS firewall service went live just a few months ago and since then has made its way in Luxembourg's research and education community. Since early June 2025, at the request of the Ministry of Education, Children and Youth and the Centre de Gestion Informatique de l’Éducation (CGIE), the school community members’ actions are better protected from computer threats such as malware or phishing. In addition, pupils can no longer access the inappropriate content on the web. To achieve this level of protection, a content filtering system has been set up by Restena in partnership with CGIE and is operating on a DNS server running at the heart of the education and research network used by students.
A Restena/CGIE collaboration
In January 2025, when introducing its DNS firewall customised to the Luxembourg research and education institutions’ needs and specificities, Restena began working with CGIE setting up this service in secondary schools. Five months later, the DNS firewall is adapted to the criteria laid down by CGIE and is announced to become operational after the end of the Pentecost holidays.
Since 2 June 2025, content filters have now been blocking access to inappropriate or potentially dangerous websites on the educational networks of all Luxembourg secondary schools. Such a protective measure reflects the wishes expressed by the Ministry of Education, Children and Youth - communicated in mid-May 2025 - to better protect pupils from exposure to inappropriate or even dangerous content.
A European project as a spearhead
The content filtering function as well as the core DNS firewall service proposed to Restena’s community is being developed as part of the European research project ‘Enhancing Cybersecurity Services for the Luxembourgish Research and Education community’ (LuCySe4RE), led by Restena since 2023. This project aims to improve protection against the cybersecurity risks faced by the community, and benefits from feedback from its partners, including, in addition to CGIE, the University of Luxembourg, the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), the Luxembourg Institute of Health (LIH), the Lycée Guillaume Kroll (LGK), and since June 2025, its BTS Cyber Security section. Two of those partners are currently evaluating the use of the DNS firewall on their own IT networks. Their respective integration should be completed by the end of 2025.
These future integrations will play a full part in the ongoing development of the DNS firewall over the coming months, always with the aim of ensuring that the service meets the expectations of the research and education community as closely as possible.
A service for the community
Any institution operating within the research and education community in Luxembourg can benefit from the DNS firewall service. To find out more about this service, visit the dedicated webpage: https://restena.lu/en/service/dns-firewall.
A partnership for the school community
In addition to the DNS firewall and network services in general, Restena provides other essential services for the school community. The best known of these is eduroam. With it, the national education users benefit from a secure and automatic WiFi connection at universities and research institutions, and even public places, worldwide.
The collaboration between Restena and the CGIE goes even further. Thanks to it, the school community benefits from the eduID Luxembourg website authentication and access authorisation service, which enables its users to authenticate themselves for thousands of services available worldwide using a single password. In Luxembourg, this access covers several Restena services: the FileSender, the edu.lu URL shortener, and eduVPN.
These services enable students, teachers and administrative staff respectively to share large files using a solution designed for and by the education and research community, to securely redirect long URLs to short URLs while respecting their privacy and that of their visitors, and to securely access internal/Intranet resources and services outside of the RESTENA network.
Beyond national borders, their local identifiers are also valid on all websites that have subscribed to the eduID service via the other National Research and Education Networks (NREN).
Further information