Privacy News App Masks Hidden Printer Tracking Dots to Keep Whistleblowers Safe

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Content source

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/app-masks-hidden-printer-tracking-dots-to-keep-whistleblowers-safe/

Four academics from the Technical University in Dresden, Germany (TU Dresden) have created an app that detects and masks the hidden dot patterns that laser color printers secretly hide on all printed documents.


These dots encode information about the printer hardware, the printed document itself, and the date of the print. Almost all modern commercial color laser printers add them to documents without informing their users.
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Most users couldn't care less about such dots, especially since they're not visible to the human eye. But for whistleblowers, they are a real problem, as they could help oppressive governments or shady employers track down the source of a leak to a specific printer, date, or time, narrowing down the number of potential suspects.

Researchers release DEDA app

To help users keep their privacy intact, TU Dresden researchers have come up with an algorithm for detecting these dot patterns and adding extra dots on top, masking and anonymizing the source of the printed doc.
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Hidden printer tracking dots have been known since 2005

Privacy-focused organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have warned about hidden printer dots since as early as 2005, and the organization has been maintaining a list of printers that have been privately-tested and confirmed to use the dots.

Printer dots became a mainstream topic in 2016 when US authorities tracked down an NSA leaker named Reality Leigh Winner because of the hidden printer dots embedded in a document she gave out to a news agency.

In 2017, Gabor Szathmari, a security researcher for CryptoAUSTRALIA, contributed code to PDF Redact Tools that is capable of detecting and removing hidden printer tracking dots.

The DEDA app is available on GitHub. Researchers presented their work —entitled "Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents"— at the ACM Information Hiding and Multimedia Security 2018 conference that took place in Innsbruck, Austria two weeks ago.