What is DNS4EU? DNS4EU is an initiative by the European Commission that aims to offer an alternative to the public DNS resolvers currently dominating the market. Supported by the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA), the European Union’s DNS4EU secure-infrastructure project provides a protective, privacy-compliant, and resilient DNS service to strengthen the EU’s digital sovereignty and enhance digital security for European Union citizens, governments, and institutions.
The program provides robust DNS security for public institutions and their employees, ministries, local governments or municipalities, healthcare, education, and other critical services such as telecommunications providers. By working with the latter, for example, it ensures DNS resolution service for all of a telco’s customers, with minimum manual overhead for their teams.
Additionally, the DNS4EU solutions aid organizations in complying with regulatory requirements (such as GDPR) to keep data within European borders.
As these organizations often face challenges to independently developing and maintaining high-level cybersecurity measures (such as election cycles or funding), the DNS4EU project solves these challenges by providing a Europe-based, centralized, scalable solution to ensure the highest standards of security and privacy, compliant with EU regulations.
I have Unbound along with my pihole. Does that do the same job?
Yeah, unbound is a recursive server. It might be a tad slower but it does the job reliably.
You still have an upstream DNS server that you rely on to provide updates to your unbound server. Problem is that corporate or extremist government controlled DNS servers can track all of your requests as well as censor any domains they don’t approve of. And if DNS servers or their users don’t use secure protocols, then those requests additionally are tracked by ISPs or any other systems the requests travel through as well as them having the ability to block individual requests they don’t want fulfilled like the Great Firewall does or most corporate internal systems sometimes do to prevent employees from accessing social media or other sites they deem not work related.