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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
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Friday June 29 2018, @07:51AM (1 child)
The dots encode the serial number of the printer and the date/time of printing. If you bought the printer new through a big retailer, the serial number can probably be traced back to you. If you used your employer's printer, it can be traced back to your employer, who then probably can look up in the logs who sent print jobs to that printer at that time. For material that you wanted to keep anonymous, you probably chose a time where it was unlikely that others fetching printouts would see yours, therefore identification should be quite reliable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 07 2018, @06:32AM
If I was doing something dodgy, I would buy a second hand printer from some dodgy looking guy in the street market.
Some people still take cash. Others live in third world countries where no one takes anything else. We don't all
live in Seattle.
I used to know a local company that claimed to do "Office clearances, with or without the owner's permission". (Last
I heard the owner was doing time, but I am sure he has strong competition).