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:

Printer Security

Printers belong arguably to the most common devices we use. They are available in every household, office, company, governmental, medical, or education institution.

From a security point of view, these machines are quite interesting since they are located in internal networks and have direct access to sensitive information like confidential reports, contracts or patient recipes.

TL;DR: In this blog post we give an overview of attack scenarios based on network printers, and show the possibilities of an attacker who has access to a vulnerable printer. We present our evaluation of 20 different printer models and show that each of these is vulnerable to multiple attacks. We release an open-source tool that supported our analysis: PRinter Exploitation Toolkit (PRET) https://github.com/RUB-NDS/PRET

Full results are available in the master thesis of Jens Müller and our paper.

Furthermore, we have set up a wiki (http://hacking-printers.net/) to share knowledge on printer (in)security.
The highlights of the entire survey will be presented by Jens Müller for the first time at RuhrSec in Bochum.