Honorlock and AI overlays, a technical breakdown

Honorlock is, architecturally, two things stitched together. The first is a Chrome extension that the test taker installs from the Chrome Web Store. The second is a remote-proctoring session hosted on Honorlock's infrastructure that records the webcam, microphone, and a screen share for the duration of the exam. The extension is the part with detection logic; the recorded session is the part with human review. Each layer answers a different question, and each layer has a different ceiling.

The extension layer can ask Chrome anything Chrome will tell it. That means the active tab URL, focus events, copy and paste events, the DOM of the test page, and the state of other extensions that disclose themselves through chrome.management. Honorlock uses this to flag tab switches, second-window opens, and obvious automation patterns on the page itself. None of these signals reach outside the Chrome process tree.

The recorded session layer is where webcam, microphone, and the shared screen live. Honorlock uses getDisplayMedia to ask the browser for either an entire display or a specific window. The browser, in turn, asks the operating system. On macOS, the operating system is the final authority on what bytes appear in a screen capture stream. That is the boundary Whisply is built against.

The browser extension cannot enumerate native macOS applications. Chrome does not have an API that exposes the system's window list to extensions, and even Chrome itself cannot see the contents of a Mac window owned by another process unless screen capture is granted and the window does not opt out of sharing. So a Mac-native menu bar app drawn above the browser is, from the Chrome extension's perspective, invisible to its detection code.

Honorlock's room-scan and ID check happen before the exam over the webcam. They look for second monitors, second devices, and notes within frame. They do not enumerate processes on your Mac. The room scan is a video clip of the physical environment, judged by a human, not a hardware audit of your machine.

Honorlock's search-engine watcher checks whether the exam questions are appearing on the public internet from indexed sites. It does not see your local clipboard, your local LLM session, or a private assistant that never sends the question to a public search index.

The honest engineering reason Whisply is Mac-only is the window server. Apple's compositor reads a single bit per window, sharingType, and uses it to decide whether the window's pixels are included in any frame handed to a capture client. AVCaptureScreenInput, ScreenCaptureKit, the QuickTime path, the WebRTC display-capture path inside Chromium, and the Cmd+Shift+5 screenshot tool all respect that bit. Whisply sets it to NSWindowSharingNone on every overlay window it owns.

This is a single point of truth. Whisply does not need to know that Honorlock is the one asking for the screen. It does not need to detect Chrome, or Zoom, or Loom, or QuickTime. The macOS compositor handles the exclusion before any other process receives the pixels. That is why we put the work there instead of trying to identify and ship around every proctor individually.

The cost is the platform limit. There is no equivalent path on Windows that is as clean, which is why Whisply does not have a Windows build. The category we built is a macOS overlay, and the trade we accepted is that it works on macOS or it does not work at all.

The free and Pro tiers already use the NSWindowSharingNone exclusion. Pro Undetected adds an armed mode that hardens Whisply against proctors that try to detect the app through indirect signals, including process-name fingerprinting, hardware-event polling, and accessibility-API enumeration. Honorlock's Chrome extension is not in the category that benefits from arming, but several lockdown-style proctors are, which is why armed mode is a single switch rather than per-vendor configuration.

Pro Undetected also unlocks Computer Use, which lets Whisply act on your Mac through the Accessibility permission. This is the mode where the assistant can click, type, and operate UI on your behalf. It is not specific to proctored environments and is not recommended during exams. Use it for the work that happens between exams.

Honorlock is in Whisply's built-in supported list out of the box on Pro Undetected, alongside LockDown Browser, Safe Exam Browser, Examplify, OnVUE, Proctorio, Prometric, Guardian, Inspera, Examity, and the rest. No per-proctor setup is needed from you.

The overlay-exclusion model only protects pixels. If you speak to the assistant out loud during a recorded session, the microphone captures your voice and the proctor has the audio. If you read an answer off the overlay and your eye movement is enough for the eye-tracking model to flag, the eye-tracking model will flag it. The technology removes the overlay from the recording. It does not remove the human in front of the recording.

Behavioral signals are also out of scope for any window-level exclusion. Honorlock flags long pauses, sudden answer reveals, and looking off-screen the same way regardless of whether anything was actually there. A clean compatibility matrix on this page is not a promise that a human reviewer will not flag a session for reasons unrelated to the overlay.

And the standard caveat. Proctors update their detection logic, browsers update their capture APIs, and macOS updates the window server. We track all three and adjust. We do not promise an indefinite future where any specific combination behaves the same as it did the day this page was written.