Kavach

Keep Indian personal data out of LLM prompts.

Kavach (कवच, "shield") detects Aadhaar, PAN, UPI IDs, bank details, phone numbers and more, replaces them with placeholders before your prompt reaches an LLM, and restores them in the reply. It runs locally, has no runtime dependencies, and uses deterministic rules (patterns, checksums and context words) rather than another model.

Website: kavach-pii.vercel.app

from kavach import Kavach

session = Kavach().session()

safe = session.mask("My PAN is ABCPE1234F, refund to rahul@okaxis")
# 'My PAN is [PAN_1], refund to [UPI_1]'

reply = call_llm(safe)  # the LLM only ever sees placeholders
print(session.unmask(reply))  # 'Refund for ABCPE1234F has been sent to rahul@okaxis'

Status: alpha (v0.2.0). The API may change before 1.0. Measured accuracy on a synthetic benchmark is in Accuracy.

Why

Security reviews often block LLM features in Indian fintech, insurance and health apps because customer data would be sent to a third-party model. Generic PII tools cover some Indian IDs (Microsoft Presidio detects Aadhaar and PAN, for example) but miss the identifiers these apps handle most: UPI IDs, IFSC codes, bank account numbers, GSTINs and Indian phone formats, often written in Hinglish. Kavach fills those gaps and makes masking reversible, so your app keeps working after the LLM responds.

Install

pip install kavach-pii

The package is kavach-pii; the import is kavach. Requires Python 3.10+ and has no dependencies. For the MCP server, install kavach-pii[mcp]. (An unrelated PyPI package named kavach also uses the kavach import name; do not install both in the same environment.)

To try unreleased changes, install from source:

pip install git+https://github.com/harshita1615/kavach-pii.git

What it detects

Context words in English, Hinglish and Devanagari ("mera aadhaar", "khata number", "मोबाइल") raise confidence. When two matches overlap, Kavach keeps the higher-confidence, longer and more specific one, so 9876543210@paytm is one UPI ID, not a phone number.

Planned next: ABHA health ID, PIN code, voter ID, passport and vehicle numbers (v1.1); names and addresses (v2).

Usage

Choose entities and mode

k = Kavach(entities=["AADHAAR", "PAN", "UPI"], mode="mask")

Switching mode is a config change, not a code change. k.redact(text) always redacts, whatever the mode.

Sessions

Use one session per conversation. Within a session the same value always gets the same placeholder, across messages and formatting variants (2345 6789 0123 and 234567890123 are both [AADHAAR_1]). The mapping lives only in the session's memory: it is never logged, written to disk or shown in repr().

session = k.session()
session.mask("PAN ABCPE1234F")  # 'PAN [PAN_1]'
session.mask("Is ABCPE1234F verified?")  # 'Is [PAN_1] verified?'
session.counts  # {'PAN': 2}, safe to log
session.clear()  # forget everything

Tell the model to keep placeholders intact:

from kavach import SYSTEM_PROMPT  # "Keep every placeholder exactly as written ..."

unmask() tolerates small edits such as [pan_1] or [ PAN_1 ], and leaves placeholders it does not know unchanged rather than guessing.

Streaming

LLM responses arrive in chunks, and a placeholder can be split across them ([PA + N_1]). The stream unmasker holds back a possible partial placeholder until it is complete:

stream = session.stream()
for chunk in llm_stream(safe):
    print(stream.feed(chunk), end="")
print(stream.flush())

Scan only

for d in Kavach().scan(text):
    print(d.entity_type, d.start, d.end, d.score)  # d.text_in(text) gives the value

Command line

kavach scan chat.txt                  # types, line/column and confidence; never the values
kavach scan --json *.txt              # machine-readable
kavach scan --entities PAN,UPI -      # read from stdin
kavach redact chat.txt -o safe.txt    # replace PII with placeholders

kavach scan exits with 1 when it finds anything, so it works as a pre-commit or CI check. There is no mask command: restoring later would require saving the mapping to disk, which Kavach never does. Use the Python API for reversible masking.

MCP server

kavach-mcp lets an AI assistant (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor and other MCP clients) check and redact files without reading the personal data in them.

pip install "kavach-pii[mcp]"

The extra installs the official MCP Python SDK; plain pip install kavach-pii stays dependency-free. The server runs locally over stdio and makes no network calls.

Ask it to "summarise customers.csv using Kavach" and it scans the file, writes customers.redacted.csv and reads only that copy, so the real values never enter the conversation. The server's instructions tell the assistant to work this way.

Connect it. --root sets the folders the file tools may use (default: the current folder); repeat it for more than one.

• Claude Code: claude mcp add kavach -- kavach-mcp --root /path/to/data, or a .mcp.json in the project:

  {
    "mcpServers": {
      "kavach": { "command": "kavach-mcp", "args": ["--root", "/path/to/data"] }
    }
  }
  

• Claude Desktop: add the same "kavach" entry under mcpServers in claude_desktop_config.json. On Windows, give the full path to kavach-mcp.exe (or to python.exe with "args": ["-m", "kavach.mcp_server", "--root", ...]).

• Without installing: uvx --from "kavach-pii[mcp]" kavach-mcp --root /path/to/data.

--entities and --threshold work as in the command-line tool.

Safety. The file tools refuse paths outside --root, including through .. or symlinks. They never overwrite the input file, and replace an existing redacted copy only with overwrite=true. Files must be UTF-8 text, up to 10 MB. Redaction keeps no mapping, so nothing can be restored through the server.

Limits. Any text the assistant passes to scan_text or redact_text, it has already read; those tools protect where the text goes next, not the conversation itself. Kavach also cannot stop an assistant from opening the original file with its own file tools. To rule that out in Claude Code, keep the originals in a folder it may not read and write the redacted copies elsewhere, for example in .claude/settings.json:

{ "permissions": { "deny": ["Read(./data/**)"] } }

with redact_file(path="data/customers.csv", output_path="safe/customers.csv").

Accuracy

Measured on the holdout split of Kavach's public synthetic benchmark: 600 sentences in English, Hinglish and Hindi, 581 labelled values, and 141 sentences with no PII but plenty of look-alikes (order IDs, UTRs, PNRs, timestamps). The holdout templates were written after Kavach was tuned and have never been used to tune it.

¹ The value was hidden by a detection of any type, so it would not reach the LLM.

Compared with Microsoft Presidio 2.2.364 on the same data:

² On one Windows laptop, Python 3.14. Presidio's time is mostly spaCy NER, which also finds names and places that Kavach does not.

Where Kavach is weaker:

• Phone false alarms. A bare 10-digit number starting 6-9 (a coupon code or an order number with no label) looks exactly like a mobile number. Kavach errs towards masking.
• Bank accounts without a keyword. Kavach needs a context word nearby ("account", "a/c", "khata"), so a line like "Copying from my passbook: 50100…" is missed. Presidio masks more bank numbers here (91.5% vs 84.5%), mostly as other entity types.
• UPI IDs with handles Kavach does not know, when no "UPI" keyword is nearby.

Brackets-intact round trips (mask, then echo, reorder, change case or spacing, or stream in chunks, then unmask) restored every value in all 467 holdout sentences Kavach masked. If the LLM drops the brackets (PAN_1), nothing is restored.

Full tables, the tuning ("dev") split, and how to reproduce everything: benchmark/README.md. Results are written by python -m benchmark.run_eval and never edited by hand.

Privacy principles

• Everything runs in-process. Kavach makes no network calls.
• Raw values are never logged, printed, stored or included in errors. A test fails the build if the package starts logging or printing.
• Audit output is limited to entity types and counts.
• All test and benchmark data is synthetic. Never file an issue with real personal data; use made-up values in the same format.

Limitations

Kavach reduces the chance of PII reaching an LLM; it cannot guarantee that none will. It is a risk-reduction tool, not legal advice, and using it does not by itself make an application compliant with the DPDP Act or any other law.

Known gaps today:

• Names, addresses and free-text personal details are not detected (planned for v2).
• Landline numbers and special GSTIN formats (TDS/TCS, non-resident) are not covered.
• IDs written with Devanagari digits (२३४५…) are not detected; only ASCII digits are.
• About 1 in 10 random 12-digit numbers starting 2-9 pass the Aadhaar checksum, so some unlabelled IDs may be masked as Aadhaar. A label right before the number ("Order", "UTR", "PNR", "Invoice") lowers the score.
• Numbers can get the wrong placeholder type (for example a phone number as [BANK_ACCOUNT_1]), though the value is still masked.
• If the LLM rewrites a placeholder beyond small case and spacing changes, it cannot be restored.

Development

python -m venv .venv
.venv\Scripts\activate          # Windows; use source .venv/bin/activate elsewhere
pip install -e ".[dev]"
pytest
ruff check . && ruff format --check .

Roadmap

1. Python package (this repo): core detection and masking ✅, benchmark ✅, PyPI release ✅
2. Chrome extension (extension/): warns before PII is pasted or sent into ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini; runs fully on-device. Built and tested; Chrome Web Store submission pending
3. Integrations: MCP server ✅, website ✅; next: web demo, OpenAI-compatible proxy, Presidio recognizer pack, n8n node

Related work

• Microsoft Presidio: general PII detection and anonymization. It ships recognizers for Aadhaar, PAN, GSTIN, Indian passport, voter ID and vehicle registration, though they are not enabled in its default English setup (as of 2.2.364). Kavach aims to complement it, and a Presidio recognizer pack is planned.

License

MIT © 2026 Harshita Chaudhary