Network calls and privacy

ArkhiNet is a desktop app that works from a file you control. It doesn’t phone home with your data. This page lists every network call it makes, so you can tell your security team exactly what to expect.

What ArkhiNet never sends

• No telemetry and no analytics. ArkhiNet doesn’t track which features you use.
• No crash reporting. Errors are written to a local log file and stay there. To find it, open Settings (⚙ or Ctrl+,), click Updates & About, then click Open Log Folder. If you report a problem, you choose whether to send main.log with it.
• No inventory upload. Your data file is only read from and written to the place you chose.

Automatic calls

ArkhiNet makes only two calls on its own:

Call	When	What for
Fortinet’s hardware RSS feed (support.fortinet.com)	Once each time the app starts	End-of-sale and end-of-support dates shown for Fortinet devices
Update check (GitHub, where ArkhiNet releases are published)	At launch and every 6 hours while running	Finding, downloading and installing new signed versions

Updates download in the background and install when you quit. You can check by hand with ☰, then Help, then Check for Updates…, or in Settings under Updates & About.

Calls you make yourself

Everything else happens only when you ask for it:

• Your own connections: SSH, Telnet, serial, ping, and the browser or RDP sessions you launch. These go straight from your computer to the device.
• External IP lookup, which asks api.ipify.org for your public IP when you open the IP / DNS / MAC Lookup tool or click ↺ Refresh there.
• DNS lookups in the IP / DNS / MAC lookup tool, sent to this computer’s DNS servers or to a server you type.
• Port and network scans you run, which reach only the addresses you enter.
• AbuseIPDB lookups, which open the AbuseIPDB page for an address in your web browser.

License checks

If you have a Team license key, ArkhiNet talks to the license service, Keygen (api.keygen.sh):

• On activation, when you paste a key in Settings, License, and click Activate. ArkhiNet sends the license key, a machine fingerprint, and the computer’s name so the activation can be listed against your license.
• About once a week after that: when ArkhiNet starts and the last check is more than 7 days old, it confirms the license is still valid and picks up its current expiry.

The machine fingerprint is a hash derived from Windows’ machine ID, not the ID itself. If the license service can’t be reached, ArkhiNet checks the key’s signature offline and keeps working.

Without a license key, ArkhiNet never contacts Keygen. The free version makes no license calls at all. See Activate a Team license.

Working offline

With a data file on a local drive, ArkhiNet works fully offline. Your inventory, topology, reports, Notepad, scripts and local shells don’t need a network. Calls that fail because you’re offline, such as the EoS feed or the update check, simply don’t return anything, and the app carries on.

If your data file is on a network share or a synced folder and that location drops out, a banner warns that the data file is unreachable, and ArkhiNet keeps showing the data it last loaded.

Clipboard

ArkhiNet never writes to your clipboard on its own. It copies only when you click a copy button or select text in a terminal (select to copy, which you can turn off in Settings, Terminal). It reads the clipboard only when you paste, and by default asks before pasting more than one line into a terminal.

Tamper protection

Since 4.9.7, the installed app also protects itself against other programs on your PC:

• It switches off several developer features of the engine it runs on, so other software can’t use them to take control of ArkhiNet or run its own code under ArkhiNet’s name.
• It checks its own program files every time it starts, and won’t run if they’ve been changed.
• It refuses to start with debugging options.

None of this changes how you use ArkhiNet, and your data and settings are untouched.