DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit

Summary

DEDA - tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation toolkit Document Colour Tracking Dots, or yellow dots, are small systematic dots which encode information about the printer and/or the printout itself. This process is integrated in almost every commercial colour laser printer. This means that almost every printout contains coded information about the source device, such as the serial number. On the one hand, this tool gives the possibility to read out and decode these forensic features and on the other hand, it allows anonymisation to prevent arbitrary tracking. If you use this software, please cite the paper: Timo Richter, Stephan Escher, Dagmar Schönfeld, and Thorsten Strufe. 2018. Forensic Analysis and Anonymisation of Printed Documents. In Proceedings of the 6th ACM Workshop on Information Hiding and Multimedia Security (IH&MMSec '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 127-138. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3206004.3206019 Installation Install Python 3 Install Deda From PyPI: $ pip3 install --user deda Or from current directory: $ pip3 install --user . Optional requirement by deda_anonmask_apply (Unix and GNU/Linux only): $ pip3 install --user wand Without Wand, pages containing white areas on images cannot be anonymised. Graphical User Interface To open the GUI type: $ deda_gui Terminal Application 1. Reading tracking data Tracking data can be read and sometimes be decoded from a scanned image. For good results the input shall use a lossless compression (e.g. png) and 300 dpi. Make sure to set a neutral contrast $ deda_parse_print INPUTFILE 2. Find a divergent printer in a set of scanned documents $ deda_compare_prints INPUT1 INPUT2 [INPUT3] ... 3. Analysing an unknown tracking pattern New patterns might not be recognised by parse_print. The dots can be extracted for further analysis. $ deda_extract_yd INPUTFILE 4. Create your own tracking dots If you want to create your own tracking dots matrix and add it to a pdf document, pass the contents as parameters (see ...