DEDA – Tracking Dots Extraction, Decoding and Anonymisation Toolkit
The DEDA toolkit is a software utility designed to detect and decode 'yellow dots'—forensic tracking patterns embedded by commercial laser printers. It allows users to analyze these tracking features or anonymize documents to protect privacy.
Why it matters
It addresses significant privacy and surveillance concerns regarding how physical documents can be traced back to specific printers and users.
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
Install Python 3 Install Deda From PyPI: $ pip3 install --user deda
Or from current directory: $ pip3 install --user .
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