Canon copiers to tell tales
Canon has announced version 5 of its uniFLOW central document management system, which can reportedly prevent the copying, faxing or printing of a document that contains certain keywords. Canon say that, if required, the system can even notify a system administrator and provide a copy of the suspicious document.
This feature is intended to help prevent proprietary data from leaking or being duplicated without permission. The blocking mechanism is based on an "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) technology from the Belgian company, Iris, which analyses documents on UniFlow servers. How exactly this is to function on a photocopier remains an open question.
However, the blocking mechanism can reportedly be bypassed simply by changing the character order or spelling of the listed keywords (if they are known) – for instance, by replacing an o with a 0 or an I with a 1.
Other Data Loss Prevention (DLP) solutions tend to focus on checking documents and data on a PC and, for instance, prevent proprietary data from being sent in emails or copied to USB flash drives.
See also:
- Stored images on photocopiers a security risk, a report from The H.
(crve)