Third-party approach to controlling digital copiers

The 10th International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services (iiWAS2008) was held in Linz, Austria from November 24th to 26th, 2008. It focused on practical development in areas such as e-business and security managements. There were about 130 participants and 32 presentations at the acceptance rate of 27%. Hitachi's Systems Development Laboratory made a presentation titled "Third-party approach to controlling digital copiers" (Photo 1).

The information leakage via paper documents is not to be overlooked because the Japan Network Security Association reported in 2007 that it accounts for 43.8% of all leakage incidents (Fig. 1). Many methods for preventing information from leaking by way of paper documents have been developed, but you cannot use them the copiers you already have because they works only with copiers that are equipped with certain security functionalities (Fig. 2).

The main idea of our approach is to split the copying process into a scanning process and a printing process (Fig. 3). When the copier receives a copy instruction, it scans the paper document and transfers both the scanned image data and the copy log to an external server linked to the copier. After the server then performs the security processing that would otherwise have to be performed in the copier, the copier receives the image data from the server and prints it. By implementing security processing in a server, third parties can control a copier without knowing its specifications.

At the conference, I had valuable discussions with researchers from all over the world.

(By Yasuhiro Fujii, Systems Development Laboratory)