Color Laser Printers Tracking Everything You Print

It's not new, but it's getting noticed: Jordan writes "Yahoo! News is reporting that several printer manufacturers are now and have been for some time embedding (nearly) invisible serial numbers in every document you print with their color laser printers, allowing law enforcement to track any such document back to the printer which printed it. The technology, ostensibly created to track down money counterfeiters, was created by Xerox about 20 years ago. A Xerox researcher says that the number-embedding chip lies 'way in the machine, right near the laser' and that 'standard mischief won't get you around it.'"

Comments

Countermeasures?

[fdiv(1,0)]

Anyone know any methods of getting around this short of physically ripping apart the printer and soldering a few wires together?

Re:Countermeasures?

[mgv]

my suggestion? find another same model printer that does this, then DUPLICATE PRECISELY these yellow dots in your final image... two sets, should--- well, supply reasonable doubt at least...


Thinking about it, adding in a speckled yellow pattern as part of your printing algorithm would work - it would just take a little knowledge of what they print.

Does anyone know if the pattern gets printed even on white space? Printing a "blank" page should reveal the pattern and allow a suitable overlay that would stuff up the recognition algorithms.

Michael

Re:Countermeasures?

[Tackhead]

> I suspect that if this technology has actually been around for 20 years, it has gotten good enough to be nearly impossible to bypass.

This technology has been around a lot more than 20 years.

In Soviet Romania, a sample page from every typewriter had to be registered with the police, so that any samizdat produced could be quickly traced back to the typewriter's owner. Use your imagination as to what happened to the owner, or Google for it.

In Romania every typewriter had to be registered with a local magistrate. Samples of letters typed on these machines had to be produced under the observation of the secret police so they could trace underground publishing activity.

- G. Davey, Christian Publishing: Before and After the Communist Collapse

In Soviet Russia, all photocopiers were registered with the KGB and kept in secure rooms, to which physical access was restricted.

Some samizdat works, mostly magazines, were typed on typewriter. The copies were indistinct and hard to read. I realized that the movement against violating human rights was doomed to be an eternal amusement of the few intellectuals without proper copyprinters. But where could one find a copyprinting machine in the country, where all the copiers were affixed with seals at night and placed in the special rooms where only proved KGB members could work on it. There was the only decision - to make the machine ourselves. It had to be easy to make and quite efficient.

- A. A. Bolonkin, Memoirs of Soviet Political Prisoner

The West is probably still playing catch-up.

Re:Countermeasures?

[mesach]

I used to work at a Kinkos in Southern California, We would get Regular visits from the SS looking to track down our Security tapes of the Self Serve color copiers, we got so that we could tell when people were doing illegal things and would point out that they were doing illegal things, and when they scoffed at us we would just point up, and they would "Stupidly" look up and give the cameras a good look at thier face so then when the SS would come in they had a good picture of the suspect.

BTW it better be REAL cash, cause people at kinkos (the average employee) has already played around with copying money, and knows what thier copiers can and cannot do and most likely will spot the fake... as I am sure you know, the copiers at kinkos arent in the best maintenance condition and the colors arent calibrated that well.

Re:Countermeasures?

[arose]

Political flyers would be the prime example. Also a call to boycot abusive printer producers. :-D

Re:Countermeasures?

[yorkpaddy]

I once printed up fake backstage passes at a kinko's. They weren't counterfeit or copied. I designed a logo that looked somewhat like that of a local radio station and put the concert's name on it. The employee said we don't let people print up IDs or counterfeit money, but this is just funny, so he let me. The passes were good enough for me to walk to the backstage area and act like I was supposed to be there. I ended up finding a box full of event staff tags and was able to go whererever I wanted to for the whole concert.

Just another reason...

[MrDyrden]

To be lazy and NOT send in your product registration card!

I mean, seriously. How else would they know who bought it and how to get a name from that serial number? I guess maybe if the store kept your credit card info on file or something and associated it with the serial number, but how often would that happen?

Lesson learned, if you want to print hundreds of forged checks or counterfeit bills, pay for the printer in cash!

In the old Soviet Union

[pherris]

The early photocopiers in the USSR had a state issued serial number eched on the glass so copies could tracked to that machine and possible the user(s). And the tracking wasn't about counterfeiting either.

It seems they were ahead of the US by 30+ years. Another sign of a dying empire.

They never learn. . .

[physicsphairy]

A Xerox researcher says that the number-embedding chip lies 'way in the machine, right near the laser' and that 'standard mischief won't get you around it.'

So use substandard mischief. :p

I'm quite serious really. Unless the serial number is tiled, just print a full border and keep whatever stuff you want to cut out away from the serial.

If it is tiled, you have a number of options. You could script a program to 'split' the image so that you print unmarked bands in multiple runthroughs which eventually add up to a full image. You could offset some unknown amount and then surround the serial number with other sequences to disguise the actual serial (would take some knowledge of how serials are assigned to do a good diguise). Both of those would require a little hardware modification. But if you're printing $100 bills. . . .

Anyway, those are just some ideas off the top of my head. The point is that if people know what they're up against, they can find a workaround. Ideally, these kinds of tricks would be kept secret. In the case, the point is trip up ignorant cons who don't account for something they don't realize exists.

Oh well. This will still nail the 16 year old delingquents who decide to pull a fast one on the clerk at their local grocery store.

You will never know.

[twitter]

Thinking about it, adding in a speckled yellow pattern as part of your printing algorithm would work - it would just take a little knowledge of what they print.

That knowledge would take lots of study to learn and you could never be sure. Printers with enough sophistication to detect currency and refuse to print can pull lots of tricks on you if it detects pattern prints and other investigations. A blank page needs no identification marks at all and the printer may refuse to print any. Subtle variation in letter spacing or shape can have the same effect. Do you know exactly where each pixel in each character you print are supposed to go? Missing pixels can encode a serial number as well as those that are not supposed to be there.

PROM???

[Nom du Keyboard]

a chip located "way in the machine, right near the laser" that embeds the dots when the document "is about 20 billionths of a second" from printing.

What are the chances that this is in PROM that is burned internally once the serial number is assigned? If so, overwrite it with a new code, perhaps through an undocumented command to the printer controller. After all, you don't think each of these chips is uniquely made, or that they don't have to do something like this to keep them all properly matched to the corresponding external serial numbers.

Or is it RAM, loaded by the firmware on each power-up? Then change your internal printer serial number. Those things are set during manufacture somehow.

Or look up Xerox's patent on the process.

Or swap your yellow, cyan, and magenta toners around, and make the corrections in Photoshop to get the desired image with the transposed colors. They'll be looking for the wrong color dots.

Or add lots of dots of your own.

Ever notice that this isn't the only anti-counterfeiting technology that likes to use yellow. Why is that?

Was I seeing these yellow dots, or others?

[Old Man Kensey]

Speaking of Kinko's, I worked there for about a year and a half. A lot of the time I'd see yellow dots on color-laser customer originals that was being scanned for enlargement to poster size. I'd always remove them during cleanup, because it was easy if you knew Photoshop. They were really obvious when you blew the image up 450% on the screen to get rid of dust (a dust speck on an 8.5 x 11 will look like a big drop of ink at 36 x 48).

Up till now I've always assumed the dots I saw (usually in empty areas, and always in a regular, widely-spaced square grid pattern) were the scanner picking up the paper tone as a very light yellow and trying to dither to match. But was I actually seeing these anti-counterfeiting dots? And if so, was I committing a felony by removing them? :)

I never noticed our Tektronix color lasers (780/7700) putting them on its output, nor the Xerox DocuColor four-color xerographic copiers (DC12/DC2045/DC6060), although the only ones I really gave the eagle-eye inspection to a lot were the DC output since the Teks were in the customer area and we usually only heard about those when they were out of toner or paper. You could see them on the customer originals if you really looked and turned the paper so the light shone off the toner, but you wouldn't notice them if you weren't looking for them.

And if any of you out there in Kinko-land have a grid chart in your store that gives you enlargement and reduction proportions so you don't have to play with the damned wheel, yeah, I made up that chart.

Discovering the Number

[buckhead_buddy]

I used to work at a check printing company. My gut feeling is that this smacks of a manipulative urban legend rather than a real technology.

Yes, I'm sure that it is feasible with today's technology, but the expense of doing this on all color printers in the low profit margin color printer market makes me dubious. It will take a law to get all the suppliers to comply and create an "even-playing field" of expense for everyone. The patriotism Xerox demostrates may be commendable that their products are more trackable but it isn't profitable.

Looking at the problems with the coordination of the ISBN book publishing numbers or the social security numbers makes coordiantion of a secret serial number system that's shared between international suppliers even more absurd. "Oops, we accidentally re-used the secret id numbers for the Xerox printers with these knock-off Zerox printers for Tiger Direct."

Finding the serial number is a good first step. Refill an empty toner cartridge with black toner. This will not tell you the serial number (you'll have to do comparisons between printers of the same model to get that), but the presence of the serial number should be easier to find. If it's not there with the black toner then it's either a more subtle technology (modulating the laser itself?) or it's not going to be found.

The great thing about color laser is its comparative cheapness. Dye Sublimation printers were what the check people would use for very impressive mock-ups, but the dye refills were very, very expensive compared to the laser printer refills. Still, when someone in the art department wanted to make a fake United Federation of Planets Passport, they'd go for the dye sub printer when the boss wasn't looking.

Re: Gold-backed currency

[flimflam]

Note, the USD isnt real, its been fake since 1913 when federal reserve was setup privately, its just paper only worth the trust of the govt in getting income taxes to pay for it.

Um, I hate to tell you this, but while the US$ may not be "real" in the sense that it directly represents an actual commodity, there is no less trust involved in a gold-backed currency. First of all, how do you actually verify that the apparently gold-backed dollars in your wallet are actually backed by gold? You'd have to turn them in and trust that you'd actually get some amount of gold in exchange. And how do you know that the gold you own is actually worth something? While gold is actually useful, it certainly doesn't have enough intrinsic value to justify its market price. It's value is primarily derived from the speculation of others like you who trust that it will have some enduring value and is therefor a safe investment.

An interesting story: a friend and co-worker of mine is from Bosnia, and lived with his family in Sarajevo during the war. His mother had saved her gold and jewels believing that they would help them during (or after) the siege. Before the end, however, she ended up trading most of them (they'd be worth a couple thousand dollars, now) for a dozen eggs. It just goes to show the extent to which the relative value of anything can change based on the current situation.

Print the same blank sheet thru lost of printers?

[Tangential]

I wonder if running the same sheet of paper, printed as a blank page, thru 10-20 printers if it would garble this registration info to the point of uselessness?