The electric ballast for ceramic metal halide lamp needs a protection circuit to prevent from over voltage and over current in the case that the lamp or the electric ballast are in faults. In this paper, cost-effective and high performance protection circuit is proposed for the electric ballast. The proposed protection circuit is adapted to the electric ballast with $LC_SC_P$ resonance type half bridge inverter. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed circuit can protect effectively under open and short fault conditions.