Palladium Cryptography

Many organizations posses valuable information they guard closely. As more of this information is stored in computers the need of data security becomes increasingly important. Protecting this information against unauthorized usage is therefore a major concern for both operating systems and users alike. As we tend towards a more and more computer centric world, the concept of data security has attained a paramount importance. Though present day security systems offer a good level of protection, they are incapable of providing a “trust worthy” environment and are vulnerable to unexpected attacks. Palladium is a content protection concept that has spawned from the belief that the pc, as it currently stands, is not architecturally equipped to protect a user forms the pitfalls and challenges that an all-pervasive network such as the Internet poses. Palladium is the codename for an evolutionary set of features for Microsoft Windows operating system. When compared with a new breed of hardware and applications, these features will give individuals and group of users greater data security, personnel privacy and system integrity. Palladium provides a solid basis for trust to perform more and more important financial, legal and other transactions: a foundation on which privacy-and security-service software can be built. The hardware part is based on Intel’s “Trusted Computing Platform Alliance”(TCPA), which provides for a monitoring and reporting component to be mounted in PC. As a drastic change in pc hardware is not feasible largely due to economic reasons, palladium hopes to introduce a minimal change in this front. A paradigm shift is awaited in this scenario with the advent of usage of palladium, thus making content protection a shared concern of both software and hardware. In the course of this paper the revolutionary aspects of palladium are discussed in detail.