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.

A case study to restructure the present data security system of JNTU examination system using palladium is put forward.