Context
The Luxchat4gov project was born from a critical gap identified during the 2020 global pandemic. While formal communication remained anchored in traditional tools such as emails, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings (made difficult during the pandemic), civil servants lacked a secure, state-provided and sovereign platform for official but informal communications, specifically but not only through mobile devices. This led to the proliferation of ‘Shadow IT’, where professional communications and metadata were transmitted via commercial platforms for example WhatsApp or Signal, exposing government affairs to security risks. Without a credible alternative platform offering the same ease of use and accessibility on mobile devices, there was no effective means to curb these informal communication channels.
Objectives
The primary objectives of Luxchat4gov are centred on establishing digital sovereignty by providing a secure, national, and interoperable communication solution hosted entirely within Luxembourgish borders to ensure complete national control over data. A critical goal of the project was to mitigate the risks and offer an attractive alternative to Shadow IT – specifically the reliance on commercial messengers such as WhatsApp or Signal, which store sensitive metadata (for example, contact lists and conversation timestamps) on foreign servers under external jurisdictions.
By leveraging the open-source Matrix protocol, the project aims to provide end-to-end encryption and high-trust identification through the national unified identity provider (Single Sign-on/Identitity and Access Management – SSO/IAM), ensuring that the identity of every interlocutor is verified without requiring personal mobile numbers. Furthermore, the platform is designed as a resilient ‘out-of-band’ communication channel, specifically intended to remain functional as a fallback for the public sector during national network crises or cyberattacks on the central state infrastructure. Beyond internal government use, the service delivery partner LuCIX, together with other public and private actors, aims to foster a broader sovereign Luxchat ecosystem, enabling secure and interoperable communication between the state, the private sector, and its citizens, for example coordination between the education sector and parents.
Implementation
Implementation followed a pragmatic 2020 ‘Fail Fast’ pilot to test Matrix-based prototypes, followed by an official launch in May 2023. The service has since scaled to support over 13 000 registered agents across ministries, the army, and the police. Governance is spearheaded by the Ministry for Digitalisation, which coordinates a multi-actor ecosystem. Key partners include the Centre des Technologies de l’Information de l’État (CTIE), which manages secure IAM/SSO authentication, and the Luxembourg Internet eXchange (LuCIX), the primary service delivery partner. LuCIX provides redundant hosting in national data centres, ensuring the infrastructure remains a resilient ‘out-of-band’ fallback channel independent of the main state network.
Staff allocation involves a cross-functional team of technical and policy experts from the Ministry, CTIE, and LuCIX. The Ministry has a five-year service delivery contract with LuCIX, of around EUR 4.4 million including operation of the service, maintenance, and development of the service, and prioritises funding code maintenance and feature development over static licensin, which ensures sustainability by investing in digital public goods. Furthermore, joining the Digital Commons European Digital Infrastructure Consortiums (EDIC) is currently underway, collaborating with partners such as France and Germany in the future to maintain the underlying Matrix open-source protocol and build a sovereign and interoperable European messaging ecosystem.