Autonomous system
AS8978 ASN-HOLYSEE Holy See Secretariat of State Department of Telecommunications
Unclassified RIPE Non-Profit
Summary
Holy See (Vatican City State)
government legacy
ASN-HOLYSEE is the network of the Holy See / Vatican City State, operated by the Secretariat of State's Department of Telecommunications from the Palazzo del Belvedere inside Vatican City.
What it's used for
- The internet connectivity of the Vatican itself: the Roman Curia, the Holy See's dicasteries and media operations, and the institutions attached to them. It is effectively a sovereign state's national network, in miniature.
- Reverse DNS on the announced space resolves into Vatican-controlled zones such as
ias.va(its internet-access service) andservice.va, alongside customer-style names of the formcust-IP-ADDR.ias.va. - A second block resolves into
pusc.it, the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome, an example of the ecclesiastical institutions numbered out of this space.
Notable
- Government address space, not commercial: the holder is a state telecommunications department, and the network exists to serve the Church's central administration rather than to sell access.
- The footprint is tiny by national standards (roughly 9,000 IPv4 addresses across two prefixes plus an IPv6 /32), but it is well connected, peering at multiple exchanges.
Interesting
- Vatican City is one of the smallest territories on the internet to run its own AS and its own country-code TLD (
.va), and this ASN is the whole of it.
This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy. Source, and how to suggest an edit.
Interconnection
Peering at a glance
Internet exchanges
Recorded at 2 exchanges in 1 country, largest first.
| Exchange | Location | Their address |
|---|---|---|
| Milan Internet Exchange | Milan, Italy | 217.29.67.3 |
| Roma Internet Exchange Point | Rome, Italy | 193.201.28.7 |
Transit providers
8 upstream, 1 downstream and 17 adjacent networks observed; most-used upstreams first.
Exchange presence is recorded rather than inferred: the directory collected by Packet Clearing House (https://www.pch.net/ixp/data) on 2026-10-11, licensed CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Transit is inferred from observed BGP paths, never declared by either party.
Address space
Summary
IPv4 6 prefixes · 8.96K addresses IPv6 1 prefixes
| Country | Name | Prefixes |
|---|---|---|
| VA | Holy See | 7 |
Registry
Allocation record
- Registry
- RIPE
- Handle
AS8978- Registry name
- ASN-HOLYSEE
- Registrant
- DIRTLC-VA-MNT
- Abuse contact
- direzione.tlc@scv.va
- Registered
- 2002-04-09
- Last changed
- 2025-09-25
- Allocation
- allocated
Declared
PeeringDB profile
- Name
- Holy See
- Also known as
- Holy See - Department of Telecommunications
- Network type
- Non-Profit
- Scope
- Global
- Traffic ratio
- Mostly Outbound
- Peering policy
- Open
- Present at
- 1 exchanges
- Facilities
- 3 facilities
- Website
- http://www.vaticanstate.va
PeeringDB records are maintained by the network operator and are not independently verified. Treat them as a statement of intent rather than of fact. For the observed and recorded view, see peering, which lists the exchanges Packet Clearing House has a port on file for.
Routing security
RPKI and IRR
- RPKI
- 100% valid · 3 valid, 0 with no ROA
- ROAs
- 3 authorising AS8978
- ASPA
- no ASPA record
- IRR
- 100% registered · 3 of 3 announcements
- Route objects
- 4 naming AS8978
Reputation
Classification and threat
Unclassified Not in the curated lists. Most of the ~80,000 allocated ASNs are not.
Spamhaus DROP
Not on ASN-DROP The network as a whole is not listed.
No DROP prefixes None of its announced space is on the DROP prefix list.
Spamhaus DROP ("Don't Route Or Peer") lists space and networks run by, or hijacked for, spam and cybercrime operations: 431 networks and 1,768 prefixes, as published 2026-10-12. A short, high-confidence list, so a match is worth taking seriously, and absence from it says little on its own.
FBI IC3
No IC3 indicators Nothing from the FBI IC3 feed.
IC3 threat data is alpha. Absence of an indicator is not evidence of good behaviour, only of absence from this one feed.
Elsewhere