A system includes multiple hardware circuits and protection circuitry. The multiple hardware circuits are coupled to respective power domains having respective sets of domain-specific power settings. The protection circuitry is configured to monitor requests in which one or more of the hardware circuits request transitions between the domain-specific power settings, to determine, from among multiple system-level combinations of the domain-specific power settings, a subset of system-level combinations that could potentially be traversed in performing the requested transitions, and to initiate a responsive action upon detecting that any of the system-level combinations in the subset is specified as invalid.