Wireless printing is not secure by default. A hacker of even medium skill who is within a few blocks of your home or office can record everything you send to your printer and reconstruct it into the original documents.
When you print pictures of Mt. Rushmore, that’s not a big deal. But when you’re printing your tax forms or other confidential documents, it can be a bit scary.
Wireless Printing Is The Same As Wired Printing—Just Without The Cord
All printers have a printer control language. We talked about PostScript, the most popular printer control language, in a previous post, but there are a few dozen other highly popular printer languages. (Each printer manufacturer typically has two or three variants of their own language.)
These printer control languages were mostly developed in the day when your computer connected directly to your printer or to your company’s wired network. They included some security, but that security focused on keeping down costs by preventing unauthorized users from using expensive printers.
When printers went wireless, printer manufacturers saved money by continuing to use the same printer control languages they used for wired networking. But wireless is different from wired networking in one very important way: anyone with a wireless card can pick up the signals transmitted by any other nearby wireless card.
Improvements In Wireless Security
Printers weren’t the only type of device which was adapted to wireless networking without thought of security. Pretty much every software and hardware system from the late 1990s found itself adapted to wireless networking by the mid-2000s. This created a whole rash of security problems.
Network security engineers realized how difficult it would be to go in and fix all of these problems. For example, securing wireless printers would require updating the firmware and drivers for every single wireless printer on the market. That might be possible, but doing the same thing for network file storage devices, email servers, local area directories, and hundreds of other services would be practically impossible.
So they found another solution—they created a way to encrypt all data sent over wireless connections. The first attempt at doing this was called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) because it offered the same level of privacy as physically wiring your devices together. Unfortunately, WEP had some major faults which made it a security failure.
Today, most wireless devices support Wifi Protected Access (WPA, also called WPA2) which offers a level of encryption which is extremely difficult to break when used correctly.
Making Sure All Of Your Devices Use WPA
If you want to make sure hackers can’t save copies of the documents you print, you must make sure all of the devices involved in printing use WPA. That means:
- Your router must have WPA turned on.
- Every computer you plan to use to print must use WPA.
- Your printer must use WPA.
Each router is a little bit different, so check your router’s manual to learn how to turn on WPA. If your router is more than five years old, it may not support WPA—if that’s the case, you’ll either have to accept that hackers can read you documents if they want to or you’ll have to buy a newer router.
Once WPA is turned on, the other devices in your home or office should be unable to connect until they’re configured to use WPA. Windows Vista and above and Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) and above, plus all recent versions of Linux, Android, and iOS all make connecting to WPA routers easy.
Most wireless printers from the last five years should also support WPA, although you’ll have to read your printer manual to configure it.
Once you have all of your devices configured to print using WPA, you can relax knowing that you’re printing securely.
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