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German Researchers Defeat Printer-Tracking Yellow Dots

posted by martyb on Thursday June 28 2018, @07:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the measures-and-countermeasures dept.

-- OriginalOwner_ writes:

The Register reports

Beating the unique identifiers that printers can add to documents for security purposes is possible: you just need to add extra dots beyond those that security tools already add. The trick is knowing where to add them.

[...] researchers from the Technical University of Dresden [...] Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe reckon they've cracked the challenge of knowing how to anonymise printed documents, and presented their work to the Association of Computer Machinery's 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security in Innsbruck, Austria [the week of June 22].

In this paper, the TU Dresden researchers explain that they tested 1,286 documents printed on machines from 18 manufacturers, creating an extraction algorithm to identify well-known dot-patterns--and at the same time, discovering four previously undiscovered patterns coding at 48, 64, 69, and 98 bits.

Identifying new patterns is important, from a privacy point of view, since as the authors points out, an activist in a dictatorship could easily be unmasked by their printer (unless they happen to use a Brother, Samsung, or Tektronix printer, none of which seemed to carry tracking codes, the researchers said).

[...] The group has published [a] toolkit that automates the obfuscation workflow, here.

Previous: "Printer Dot Sanitisation" Software Seeks to Cleanse Yellow-Dot Watermarks

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @10:42PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @10:42PM (#700013)

    Easiest option: buy printer second hand for cash and dispose of it after the printing.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @04:38AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @04:38AM (#700125)

    This is the best idea here. Not highly technical. Anyone can do it. It's not illegal. It's easy to find a second hand printer. It's not expensive.
    Win!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @05:33PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 29 2018, @05:33PM (#700292)

      Except, as someone pointed out above, your printer driver is collecting serial numbers and chatting away merrily to Windows Update server.

      Lose!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @05:02AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @05:02AM (#703732)

        Who says they use Windows? Or the proprietary drivers?