Printer Security

Paper is traditionally not a very secure medium, unless it is held in combination-locked filing cabinets (filing cabinet locks aren't very good).   Computers aren't great for security either, as a succession of lost MOD laptops, USB pens and other security breaches prove. Paper has its merits; it's difficult to suffer (achieve) a Wikileaks scale loss of paper records because the truck to remove thousands of pages of documents tends to get noticed.

Network security and encryption on Unix systems is something we might look at elsewhere. The old scheme of user and group permissions has yet to be bettered. By default things that are printed are logged but not in great detail.

An easy way to get security for anything printed is to have individual printers, then the person who prints takes direct responsibility for the paper in their possession. The problem with lots of individual printers is that running costs are high - double or more the cost of using bigger printers.

If a great deal of material is being printed simply so that someone can read a couple of documents whilst typing another it might be an idea to cut the amount of print by using dual monitors - but again that is another story.

Shared printers are an obvious weakness. Shared printers are faster and cheaper to run that individual printers would be. However, quite apart from the natural human tendency to snoop, information can go astray. People accidentally pick up someone else's printout thinking it part of their own. This can be made a bit less likely using a simple device called an offsetter attached to the output. This moves to one side or another and directs different print jobs to stack slightly differently.

Printers can also have multi-bin mailboxes - similar to a stacker but with the bins enclosed and locked until the machine gets a PIN. Unfortunately these use quite a lot of rather specialised and unusual components, so they are not cheap.

The cheapest approach to securing jobs on a fast printer is to store the print job and ask the user for a PIN when they arrive to collect their material. It needs a fast printer because otherwise users are delayed.

Printers with numeric keypads next to the display will be preferable if PIN job protection is wanted. Some printers use repetitive pressing of the cursor keys to achieve the same effect - its a waste of time to have to press a cursor key 15 times to enter a PIN and get a print job - meaning the security feature won't be used.

Networks are the other aspect of printer security. By default the data passing to a printer is not encrypted. If the traffic is passing over a local network with a firewall between it and the next network that probably isn't an issue. On larger networks with no firewalls security might be an issue so network print servers that provide IPSec / SSL / TLS security might be preferred.