What is Kavalan? Kavalan is an online privacy and security product to protect the entire connected home. We aim to make the task of protecting your home and your connected devices against online threats as simple as signing up with a few simple clicks - no software to buy, no devices to install. Kavalan leverages the power of DNS technology to provide protection to all devices including laptops, desktops, smart speakers, televisions, smart phones, tablets and more!
How do I get help and support with Kavalan? You can reach out to us at contact@nandisecurity.com at any time. You can also look up our contact information in the 'Contacts' section of our website. We are here to help you and be successful in protecting your home from online privacy and security threats.
What does Kavalan protect my home against? Kavalan protects your home from communicating with trackers, ad networks and other entities that attempt to track all of your online movements. Kavalan also provides protection against your home communicating with known malware sites
What happens at the end of the trial period? If you are a user who signed up during our beta trials, Kavalan is being offered to you for free for one year. If you signed up for the free trial, you will have access to the service for 30 days If you choose to continue past the expiration of the trial and become a customer of ours, you can upgrade your subscription at https://www.getkavalan.com. No further set up needed. If you choose NOT to continue using Kavalan after the trial period, you will not be charged and we will disable the service for your home. You will need to remove Project Kavalan’s IP address as the ‘Primary DNS’ on your router setting and set another DNS provider as your ‘Primary DNS’.
Does Kavalan remove malware from my home network? No, Kavalan identifies and blocks communication with malicious websites and known malware sites based on threat intelligence feeds that we subscribe to. It is not a malware removal service nor does it replace anti-virus software. Malware can get into your home from various other sources such as downloaded apps, USB sticks, exposure to external networks or even previous cyber attacks on the devices in your home.
Does Kavalan remove all internet ads? Kavalan removes most kinds of internet ads such as banner ads, pop ups, etc. However, there are ads served by some networks such as Facebook, Google, etc that are inline ads which Kavalan does not remove. This is because they serve their ads as part of their service and stopping them will disrupt the service itself. However, in order to serve those ads, they watch your behavior across thousands of other internet properties and Kavalan blocks those collection attempts.
Does Project Kavalan remove pay walls? No - Kavalan is not designed for nor intends to help users violate pay walls or subscription walls
Technical Questions
Does Kavalan serve as a DNS provider? No, Kavalan is not a DNS provider - it is acts as a pre-filter to DNS. We use other common DNS providers as our downstream DNS service. Kavalan pre-filters DNS requests before sending the requests to DNS providers. The added advantage is that your DNS query traffic is also anonymized by Kavalan.
I do not know how to set up or access DNS settings on my home internet router. What do I do? The user manual or documentation for your brand of internet router will have the right instructions for specifying DNS settings. However, we are happy to work with you to help get you set up as well. Please contact us and we can guide you through the steps on the phone.
Will I lose my internet connection if Kavalan service goes down or I am disconnected from service? When you register for Kavalan, you will be asked to set the IP address of our cloud service as your ‘Primary DNS’ service. You can do one of the following additional steps to ensure that your home does NOT lose internet connection: - Your router should allow you to set additional DNS services as your ‘Secondary DNS or Back up DNS or DNS2’ service. You can take the existing IP address that is set as your ‘Primary DNS’ and make that your ‘Secondary DNS or Back up DNS or DNS2' service. Setting a backup DNS is very crucial and please make sure to not skip this step. - You can use either Google (8.8.8.8) or CloudFlare (1.1.1.1) as your ‘Secondary DNS or Back up DNS or DNS2’ service
- If your home internet router allows it and if you wish to, you could do BOTH of the above steps to ensure no loss of internet connectivity on your home network.
I do not remember the login/password to my home internet router to set it up to work with Kavalan. What can I do? Unfortunately, Nandi Security will not be able to help you with the login/password access to your home internet router. You need to set up the router to point to Kavalan to enjoy protection for the whole home. Your router vendor may have instructions on how to retrieve the login ID and password to your home router. If you use a router provided by your ISP, they may have a user name and password stuck on a sticker on the router itself
But good news is that even if you do not set up your home internet router to use Kavalan, you can still enjoy the benefits of the service by setting it up device by device. See Tips and Tricks section for more on that.
My internet service provider is already providing me with a DNS service. Why do I need Kavalan from Nandi Security? Kavalan blocks websites on the internet that Internet Service Providers will not or cannot block. Internet Service Providers can watch and see everything you do on the internet. Kavalan blocks third party trackers, ad networks and ad exchanges preventing them from delivering the ads and making money off your habits. The average person is subjected to 1700 banner ads per month (that is over 6800 for a family of 4) and 1 in 100 of those are malicious (i.e. may lead to malware sites if you clicked on them) – that is an average of 64 malicious attacks per month on a family of 4 from internet ads alone. Kavalan will report on your dashboard how many such attempts it blocked.
Last but not the least, the easiest way to find the answer the answer to this question is by signing up for a free trial of the Kavalan. You will see how much Kavalan blocks within 30 minutes of signing up.
I want to protect my mobile devices with Kavalan when I travel. Is this possible? No. Kavalan ONLY works to protect devices connected to your home network. You need to be logged in on your home wifi network to be protected by Kavalan
Is Kavalan a VPN service? No, Kavalan is NOT a VPN service. Most VPN services require an agent that needs to be installed on a device by device basis which makes it hard to protect connected devices such as televisions, refridgerators, smart speakers, etc. Which is why Kavalan uses DNS filtering technology to protect homes right at the point of their internet connection i.e. home routers.
Privacy Questions
Does Kavalan share my information with any third parties? Nandi Security, Inc does not sell or share our subscriber information with any third parties. We use AWS as our downstream DNS provider and hence channel your DNS requests through them. Further we delete all DNS query information every 48 hours! All internet communication has to happen with the help of a DNS provider and even if you didn't use Kavalan, your ISP would be using a DNS provider anyway.
What information does Kavalan collect about me and my internet habits? Kavalan collects the IP address of your connected home. This address is visible to every website you visit on the internet. This is how we identify which homes we need to protect with our service In addition, we monitor and store the DNS queries sent out by various devices in your home. We store the DNS query data to provide you with your personalized dashboard, insights and also to monitor if your home is attempting to communicate to known malware sites. We delete ALL of the DNS query data every 48 hours and the only reason we store it for 48 hours is to provide you with a rolling 24 hour dashboard.
We cannot see the content of actual websites you visit nor do we get any visibility into user names and passwords since we limit our monitoring purely to DNS information. We do use Stripe as our payments provider partner. Please make sure to review their privacy policy for the payment information you submit. We do not store your payment information on our systems.
What threats do banner ads and internet ads pose to my privacy and security? On average, a person is targeted by 1700 banner ads in a month across all online platforms. Banner ads are shown to you when the publisher of the website participates in the sharing of information about your internet habits. Ad networks and Ad exchanges collect information about you from various such sources and build a comprehensive digital profile of you that may involve thousands of independent data points. The ads you see are oriented towards that but most crucially, this digital profile of you and your behaviors is auctioned and monetized hundreds of times a day. As a result, any company or entity that seeks your information, irrespective of their motives has access to very private information such as your geolocation, health needs, sexual orientation, driving habits, hobbies, interests and more. Further, one in 100 banner ads has been found to be malicious i.e. they lead to malware sites that can cause actual damage to devices in your homes or even takeover your home devices to launch attacks on other entities.
Tips and Tricks
Can I use Kavalan to protect only specific devices in my home rather than the entire home? Yes, you can! As long as the device in question allows you to configure a ‘DNS’ service provider in their Settings, you can set the IP address of Kavalan’s service as the ‘Primary DNS’ and avail the benefits of being protected.
However, please note that Kavalan only protects the device as long as it is on the home network. If you leave the home wi-fi network and connect to a different wi-fi/Mobile network, you are NOT protected any more by Kavalan. Please always make sure to set a ‘Secondary DNS or Back up DNS or DNS2' provider so that you continue to have internet connectivity when you leave your home.
How can I view the activity of just one specific device in my home using Kavalan? Yes you can do this in a couple of ways: - If your device allows you to alter DNS settings then you can point your device to use Kavalan as its 'Primary DNS' and then remove the Kavalan as the 'Primary DNS' for your home router. This way, only one device is covered by Kavalan and your 24 hour dashboard view will show you data just specific to that device 24 hours from the time at which you set up the device.
- If you have a second router in your home, you can have the device in question connect to that router and configure only that router to use Kavalan as the 'Primary DNS' server. You still need to make sure that no other routers or devices in the home are pointing to Kavalan as their 'Primary DNS'. From the point you set this up, 24 hours later, your dashboard will reflect data only specific to that device.
