What Do Trust Levels Mean?

Trust Level plays a vital role in web hosting operation, and different trust levels do affect the right of users to run and administrate websites applications.

Trust levels allow you to set the security rules of your site. They dictate to the operations an application can carry out like reading a disk, changing file permission, accessing registry and customizing system files among others.

There are different trust levels, and each has a policy file associated with the exception of the Full trust. The user sets how the trust levels manage access to different aspects. You may decide to restrict access to different resources and operations that you feel are not secure. You set the <trust> feature a given trust level. The levels include full, high, medium, Low and minimal trust levels.

Type of Trust Permission

Full Trust Level

If applications are set at full trust level, they will be able to execute arbitrary code that is native in their process of their running. However, most people feel that this comes with risks of accessing malicious codes, and its lack of a policy file makes most users avoid it.

High Trust Level

This uses most .NET Framework approvals and support trust only partially. This is mostly for applications you trust and want to have fewer user rights to reduce the risks involved. It offers same application access as the full trust level but restricts COM Interop and unmanaged code.

Medium Trust Level

Medium trust applications can read and write on the directories associated to them, at the same time communicate with Microsoft SQL Server. The code does not grant user rights to access ODBC or OLE DB. You should set this mostly on shared server as it allows communication to SQL server files and withholds the user rights to the root structure of the application.

Low Trust Level

Though this low trust code can read its application, it cannot communicate to the database or to the network. By using this code, you allow applications to access their applications and restrict access to external resources such as system resources.

Minimal Trust Level

Minimal trust applications code allows execution of resourcing but restricts interaction with the resources. It is the best for hosting sites with a high number of websites.

 If you want to know what is the trust level you must learn each of the above trust levels and how they impact on your website. However, your web hosting providers may offer comprehensive information when you do not understand the any of the levels.