by Susan Twombly, Oct. 2007
Printers are often overlooked when it comes to securing the IT infrastructure. As protection for PCs and laptops becomes more sophisticated, hackers are looking for more vulnerable entry points into corporate or government networks — and finding them.
Left unprotected, printers are open gateways for intrusions, data theft and denial-of-service attacks, as well as viruses and worms that can spread swiftly across the enterprise.
So, it's more important than ever to safeguard the print infrastructure against malicious activity that can put your valuable information assets — and your whole business — at risk.
Until now, businesses had to rely on point solutions with manually implemented tools and security policies that were hard to enforce consistently, especially across large corporate or government environments — leaving gaps in print security for hackers to easily slip through.
HP Secure Print Advantage is comprised of both software and specialized hardware-based components. Unlike point solutions from other vendors that do not perform malware inspections, HP Secure Print Advantage helps to eliminate the threat of malware and viruses. These can be embedded within document files and spread across print environments to other devices connected to the network once the document is printed.
HP Secure Print Advantage also automates encryption key management and sets and enforces a security policy across the print network infrastructure. Further, the solution can integrate easily into your existing IT environment as an overlay to HP or heterogeneous print infrastructures. It all adds up to a comprehensive solution that can help you close security gaps and protect valuable information assets.
The backbone technologies within HP Secure Print Advantage can work together to deliver a broad range of strong, industry standard encryption algorithms and policy controls, with audit logging throughout the entire print lifecycle of a document.
For example, an encrypted client module encrypts print jobs, then sends them to the secure document server module, which decrypts and inspects the job for malware within a secure hardware boundary. Based on inspection results, the document is either terminated or re-encrypted and delivered to a secure print module for immediate printing.
When a document is intended for more than one recipient, it is sent to the secure document server component, where it is encrypted and stored. To print the document, recipients must present the necessary credentials, via a flexible authentication interface at the printer or multi-function peripheral.
To enable government agencies to meet their compliance demands, HP Secure Print Advantage meets current security certification requirements for cryptographic products, including Common Criteria EAL 4+ and FIPS 140-2 Level 4, the highest level of U.S. government security validation.
To offer more choice and interoperability across security solutions, HP also introduced the HP Secure Advantage Alliance Program, which allows independent software vendors to integrate their solutions with our broad Secure Advantage security portfolio.
We combined our core strengths in both infrastructure security and imaging/printing to deliver the HP Secure Print Advantage solution. Our 35-year history of protecting some of the world's most private information, along with our imaging and printing leadership, means you can extend your IT security policy to your print networks — to print your most sensitive documents with confidence.
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