Your start page, startup page, and search engine are the three settings most often hijacked by adware or a bad installer, so Vodou treats them specially: they're cryptographically signed with a key generated for your install, and verified on every launch.

What happens if one is tampered with

If any of the three is changed on disk by something other than Vodou's own Settings dialog, the file fails verification and Vodou restores your real last-authorized value from a sealed snapshot — not just a generic default. You'll see a one-time notice: "Vodou blocked an unauthorized change to your start page, startup page or search engine and restored your saved settings."

Reviewing what was blocked

☰ → Settings → Privacy & security → Browser Setting Protection… shows a history of every blocked change — timestamp, which setting, your value versus the attempted value, and what Vodou did about it. You can clear this history from the same panel.

Honest scope: since Vodou is a Qt WebEngine browser with no extensions, sync, or enterprise policy layer, a web page has no path to these settings at all. This protection targets the one real threat: another program on your computer rewriting the settings file directly. Always change these three settings through the Settings dialog, not by hand-editing a file — a hand-edited file trips the same guard.