Vodou
Trackers and ads blocked on-device
Requests to about 3,500 known tracker and ad domains are refused before they leave your computer. Every request also carries Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals.
Security
How Vodou protects you
Six layers, from what a web page can learn about you to how the browser updates itself. Each one says what it stops, and where it's honest about what it can't.
Layer 1
What a website can learn about you
Most tracking doesn't need your permission. These defaults cut off the usual ways a page profiles you, before it gets the chance.
No IP leaks through WebRTC
Video-call technology can expose your local network address even behind a VPN. Vodou restricts WebRTC to your public interface, so it can't.
Camera, mic, and location off by default
Location Guard, camera blocking, and microphone blocking are on from the start. Screen capture, notifications, clipboard reading, and font access are denied unless you allow them.
Nothing left behind
Cookies and history live in memory and vanish when you close the window. The page cache is overwritten with random data before it's deleted, so an undelete tool finds noise.
Honest limit: on SSDs an overwrite isn't guaranteed to hit the same physical cells. Full-disk encryption is the complete answer; shredding is a second layer.
HTTPS first
Addresses you type load over HTTPS. Self-signed certificates are only accepted for your own machine (localhost), never for the open web.
Private search by default
The default search engine is a SearXNG instance running on your own computer, so your searches don't build a profile at a search company. DuckDuckGo, Brave, Startpage, and Google are one click away if you prefer.
Layer 2
Sites that try to fool you
Phishing works by looking legitimate. Vodou checks every address before the page loads, without sending your browsing anywhere to do it.
Look-alike address detection
Catches homograph tricks (a Cyrillic “а” posing as a Latin “a”), mixed-script punycode, and typosquats like “paypa1”, computed from the hostname alone.
Honest limit: it protects the most-impersonated brands, not the whole web, and errs toward silence over false alarms.
Safe Browsing, kept on your machine
Public lists of known phishing and malware domains are downloaded on a schedule and checked locally. Not a URL, a hash, or a prefix of where you go ever leaves your device.
Honest limit: it's domain-level, and a brand-new phishing site can slip through until the next list refresh.
Risky download warnings
Files that can run code on your computer, like .exe installers, get an extra warning before they're saved, because a drive-by download is one of the easiest ways onto a machine.
Where did this image come from?
Right-click an image to read its C2PA Content Credentials, checked against the official trust list. An image with no credential is “unknown”, never “authentic”.
Honest limit: this is provenance, not a deepfake detector.
Layer 3
Your passwords
A browser vault is only as good as its worst day: a stolen laptop, a copied file, a guessed password. Vodou is designed around that day.
Memory-hard encryption
The vault file is encrypted with a key derived from your master password by scrypt, which is deliberately slow and memory-hungry to make guessing expensive. Nothing is ever written to disk unencrypted.
Hardware security keys
Optionally require a FIDO2 key. Its secret is computed inside the key and mixed into the vault's encryption, so a stolen file plus a guessed password still opens nothing. Backup keys are supported.
Protected even while unlocked
Open vault entries are re-encrypted under a throwaway session key and only decrypted for the instant you fill or copy them. The vault re-locks itself after 5 idle minutes by default.
Honest limit: this narrows the window a password sits in memory; it can't make memory forensics impossible.
Weak, reused, and duplicate detection
The vault dashboard flags weak passwords, the same password reused across sites, and duplicate entries, and generates strong replacements.
Never fills on its own
Saved logins are only filled when you ask. A page can't trigger autofill to harvest your credentials in a hidden form.
Layer 4
Software on your own computer
Adware and sketchy installers love to hijack a browser's start page and search engine. Vodou notices, and puts them back.
Browser Setting Protection
Your start page, startup page, and search engine are cryptographically signed with a key unique to your install. If another program edits them, Vodou refuses the change, restores your real setting, and logs what happened.
Honest limit: code already running as your user account could re-sign the files. This raises the bar for hijackers; it isn't antivirus.
Sealed with the operating system
Settings snapshots, cookie exceptions, and the crash-recovery file are sealed with Windows DPAPI (or your Linux keyring), so another account or a lifted disk can't read or forge them.
Hijack-proof start page
Only real web pages can be a start page. file:, chrome:, and javascript: addresses are refused, which closes a common hijacking trick.
Layer 5
Updates you can trust
Updating a browser engine is risky: a half-finished update can leave you with no browser at all. Vodou's updater is built to fail safe.
Engine updates as one verified set
Qt, PyQt6, and the Chromium-based engine are updated together as a compatible set. Every package is checked against its SHA-256 hash from PyPI before anything is installed.
Automatic rollback
The current version is backed up first. After installing, Vodou starts a fresh copy of the engine to prove it works; if it doesn't, or the update is interrupted, everything is rolled back.
Audited and tested
Every change goes through a pull request that must pass a dependency vulnerability audit before it can merge, and Vodou ships with an automated test suite covering the updater, vault, and protections.
Layer 6
Local AI and automation, on a short leash
Powerful features are also attack surface. These are off until you turn them on, and fenced in when you do.
AI that never phones home
Summaries, questions, page translation, and chat all run through Ollama on your own computer. Nothing you ask is sent to a cloud AI service.
A locked-down control channel
Vodou's optional MCP control surface listens only on your own machine, requires a fresh random token every run, and can only open tabs and read blocking stats. It has no access to files, the shell, or the vault.
Fine print
What Vodou doesn't claim
Security software that oversells itself is its own risk. So, plainly:
- It doesn't hide your IP address. Region emulation changes what scripts see, not where your traffic comes from. Use a VPN for that.
- It isn't a Chromium fork. Vodou embeds Qt WebEngine. Engine security fixes arrive when The Qt Company backports them, and the updater installs them.
- It can't stop malware that's already running as you. Its protections raise the bar against other programs and other accounts; they don't replace antivirus or full-disk encryption.
- Its translations are machine-made. The interface's 14 languages haven't been reviewed by native speakers yet.
Found something we got wrong? Report it on GitHub, or email security issues to help@misttechnologies.net.