A secure promotion mechanism promotes a current privilege level of a processor in a computer system. The current privilege level controls application instruction execution in the computer system by controlling accessibility to system resources. An operating system performs a privilege promotion instruction, which is stored in a first page of memory not writeable by an application instructions at a first privilege level. The privilege promotion instruction reads a stored previous privilege level state, compares the read previous privilege level state to the current privilege level, and if the previous privilege level state is equal to or less privileged than the current privilege level, promotes the current privilege level to a second privilege level which is higher than the first privilege level.