Tuesday, June 13, 2017

New printers vulnerable to old languages

When we published our research on network printer security at the beginning of the year, one major point of criticism was that the tested printers models had been quite old. This is a legitimate argument. Most of the evaluated devices had been in use at our university for years and one may raise the question if new printers share the same weaknesses.

35 year old bugs features

The key point here is that we exploited PostScript and PJL interpreters. Both printer languages are ancient, de-facto standards and still supported by almost any laser printer out there. And as it seems, they are not going to disappear anytime soon. Recently, we got the chance to test a $2,799 HP PageWide Color Flow MFP 586 brand-new high-end printer. Like its various predecessors, the device was vulnerable to the following attacks:

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