Protection ring

In computer science, hierarchical protection domains, often called protection rings, are mechanisms to protect data and functionality from faults (by improving fault tolerance) and malicious behavior (by providing computer security).

Computer operating systems provide different levels of access to resources. A protection ring is one of two or more hierarchical levels or layers of privilege within the architecture of a computer system. This is generally hardware-enforced by some CPU architectures that provide different CPU modes at the hardware or microcode level. Rings are arranged in a hierarchy from most privileged (most trusted, usually numbered zero) to least privileged (least trusted, usually with the highest ring number). On most operating systems, Ring 0 is the level with the most privileges and interacts most directly with the physical hardware such as certain CPU functionality (e.g. the control registers) and I/O controllers.

Special mechanisms are provided to allow an outer ring to access an inner ring's resources in a predefined manner, as opposed to allowing arbitrary usage. Correctly gating access between rings can improve security by preventing programs from one ring or privilege level from misusing resources intended for programs in another. For example, spyware running as a user program in Ring 3 should be prevented from turning on a web camera without informing the user, since hardware access should be a Ring 1 function reserved for device drivers. Programs such as web browsers running in higher numbered rings must request access to the network, a resource restricted to a lower numbered ring.

X86S, a canceled Intel architecture published in 2024, has only ring 0 and ring 3. Ring 1 and 2 were to be removed under X86S since modern operating systems never utilize them.

Multiple rings of protection were among the most revolutionary concepts introduced by the Multics operating system, a highly secure predecessor of today's Unix family of operating systems. The GE 645 mainframe computer did have some hardware access control, including the same two modes that the other GE-600 series machines had, and segment-level permissions in its memory management unit ("Appending Unit"), but that was not sufficient to provide full support for rings in hardware, so Multics supported them by trapping ring transitions in software; its successor, the Honeywell 6180, implemented them in hardware, with support for eight rings; Protection rings in Multics were separate from CPU modes; code in all rings other than ring 0, and some ring 0 code, ran in slave mode.

However, most general-purpose systems use only two rings, even if the hardware they run on provides more CPU modes than that. For example, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 (and their predecessors) use only two rings, with ring 0 corresponding to kernel mode and ring 3 to user mode, because earlier versions of Windows NT ran on processors that supported only two protection levels.

Many modern CPU architectures (including the popular Intel x86 architecture) include some form of ring protection, although the Windows NT operating system, like Unix, does not fully utilize this feature. OS/2 does, to some extent, use three rings: ring 0 for kernel code and device drivers, ring 2 for privileged code (user programs with I/O access permissions), and ring 3 for unprivileged code (nearly all user programs). Under DOS, the kernel, drivers and applications typically run on ring 3 (however, this is exclusive to the case where protected-mode drivers or DOS extenders are used; as a real-mode OS, the system runs with effectively no protection), whereas 386 memory managers such as EMM386 run at ring 0. In addition to this, DR-DOS' EMM386 3.xx can optionally run some modules (such as DPMS) on ring 1 instead. OpenVMS uses four modes called (in order of decreasing privileges) Kernel, Executive, Supervisor and User.

A renewed interest in this design structure came with the proliferation of the Xen VMM software, ongoing discussion on monolithic vs. micro-kernels (particularly in Usenet newsgroups and Web forums), Microsoft's Ring-1 design structure as part of their NGSCB initiative, and hypervisors based on x86 virtualization such as Intel VT-x (formerly Vanderpool).