What is protected mode

Authors Authors and affiliations Mohamed Omar Rayes. How to cite. This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access. Researchers bypass Internet Explorer Protected Mode n. Retrieved from The Register: www. The Windows Vista Product Guide n. The Windows operating system can restrict the malicious code from carrying out damaging actions.

An integrity mechanism restricts write access to securable objects by lower-integrity processes, in the same way that user account group membership restricts the rights of users to access sensitive system components. Important You should disable the feature only as a temporary measure during troubleshooting to compare behavior of the application when the feature is enabled or not. Is this page helpful? Yes No. Any additional feedback?

Skip Submit. Virtual mode: Intel terms protected mode as virtual mode, which permits previously written code for to run on new systems backward compatibility without any modification, providing system stability and security.

Real mode application compatibility: Windows 3. Segment addressing: In protected mode, the segment part is replaced by a bit selector. The 13 upper bits contains the index of an entry inside the descriptor table. This entry contains some flags, a limit value for the segment size, and the real line address of the segment. The lowest two bits define the privilege of the request from 0 to 3. Multitasking: This is the ability of the OS to run multiple tasks concurrently. It can only be implemented if each task is scheduled for execution on different processors.

While switching between tasks, processors save the current context information in a task state segment. When the original task has to be rescheduled for execution, the saved information is used by the processors to set their internal registers for resuming execution.

Protection: Protection mode guards against software bugs and helps the OS perform reliable multitasking. Checks are made before the memory cycle starts and any offending memory cycle is terminated, generating an exception. The stability of all software development tools is ensured by blocking illegal memory references. Paging: Pages are sections of memory. The operating system can create a different virtual address for each task, deterring one task from manipulating the memory of another.

Pages can also be transferred from primary to secondary storage, permitting more space for storage. Debugging support: As part of protected mode, provides a set of configurable debug registers. You can set a breakpoint by specifying the desired memory address in one of the debug registers and the type of cycle to trigger the breakpoint.