The engine & CAPTCHA
Engine mode, the anti-detect layer, and the captcha harvester.
What it's for
Two things live under Fingerprint, CAPTCHA & engine, and they sit at opposite ends of the isolation story. The hardened engine gives each Account a real Chrome network identity below the JavaScript layer. The CAPTCHA harvester is the one place Umbra deliberately steps outside per-Account isolation — so it's the one place on this screen you need to read carefully before a drop.
Standard vs hardened engine
The engine sets what a site reads on the wire, before any script runs.
When the engine cannot take a Session
The hardened engine carries a Session only when it can: it must have started, and the Account's proxy must be one it can chain (an HTTP proxy). A Session it could not take runs on the standard network layer — and says so, instead of showing a green disguise.
Turning on the hardened engine
Switch the mode to Hardened
It's a licensed feature — activate a licence (under Plan & licence) if the selector is locked. An environment override,UMBRA_ENGINE=1, forces it on.Restart Umbra
The engine starts and stops on restart, so the pane reads "enabled, restart to start it" until you do. If it doesn't come up after a restart, the engine binary is missing or blocked.Check a scorecard
Open any Session's fingerprint scorecard and press Measure in the TLS / HTTP-2 section. It passes when the Session rode the engine and its handshake equals real Chrome's; raw Chromium sits beside it for comparison.If an engine stops answering
Umbra checks its engines while they run. One that stops answering for about a minute is replaced: its Sessions carry on through their own exit without the engine's Chrome network identity, their fingerprint reads as degraded so the loss is visible, and the next Session that needs an engine starts a fresh one. An engine nothing is using stops after five minutes and starts again when a Session needs it, so Umbra left open doesn't hold engines it isn't using.
Solving CAPTCHAs
Umbra doesn't solve CAPTCHAs for you; it hands them to a solver you pay for. Save a 2Captcha or CapSolver key and scripts can call umbra.solveCaptcha() against your own balance. The key is stored on this device — sealed with its keystore or your passphrase, or obscured where neither is available (Settings' data map says which) — and only ever sent to the solver you chose.
The token pool pre-solves tokens ahead of a drop so checkout gets a fresh one instantly. It spends solver balance, so it's off until you arm it and is hard-capped; reCAPTCHA v3 is never pooled, because a v3 token is score-bound and worthless once it's a few seconds old. Solving by hand in the harvester is free and drops tokens into the same pool.
The harvester runs in one shared Session
When a site throws a CAPTCHA — or a Google sign-in — the solve happens in a dedicated harvester window, not in the Account that triggered it. That window is one Session shared by every Account (persist:umbra-harvester), which is what lets a Google login stick and a reCAPTCHA become one-click. It's also why it can't sit behind any single Account's exit: pointing the shared Session at Account A's exit would put Account B's solves on A's IP, manufacturing the exact link the product exists to prevent.
It says where it's coming out
Because this is the one spot where "every Session behind its own exit" isn't literally true, the harvester discloses its exit in the open — in the window title and in a banner on the page — for the whole time you're typing.