NLnet announces funding for 62 projects

[Posted June 25, 2025 by jzb]

The NLnet Foundation has announced a new group of projects receiving funding through the Next Generation Internet (NGI) Zero Commons Fund.

Free and open source technologies, open standards, open hardware and open data help to strengthen the open web and the open internet. The projects selected by NLnet all contribute in their own way to this important goal, and will empower end users and the community at large on different layers of the stack. For example, there are people working a browser controlled ad hoc cellular network (Wsdr) which can be used to create small mobile networks where they are needed. The open hardware security key Nitrokey is aiming for formal certification of their implementation of the FIDO2 standard, and will be adding encrypted storage capabilities. There are also more applied technologies: the high end open hardware microscope OpenFlexure will enable among others e-health use cases such as telepathology, allowing medical professionals to work together to help people in more remote areas.

See the announcement for the full list of selected projects and the current projects page for other projects recently funded by NLnet.

Yay for open source hardware security modules

Posted Jun 26, 2025 13:38 UTC (Thu) by hailfinger (subscriber, #76962) [Link]

Nitrokeys are less well-known than proprietary alternatives, but they do provide superior security. This is not just about verifying the source code (but that helps), but the more obvious metric is which security issues are present and which can be fixed.
On top of that, the Nitrokey 3C/3A variants have all required HSM functionality to bootstrap your own CA, although their documentation doesn't mention that explicitly. It works, though.

If you didn't buy a security token due to the price normally associated with such tokens, the Nitrokey HSM 2 and the Nitrokey 3C/3A are roughly one tenth of the price of equivalent hardware from Yubikey or others.