Konica Minolta has always been known to take security seriously. Recently, Konica Minolta started to roll out updates for their multifunction printers (MFPs) with the addition of Transport Layer Security, or TLS. While TLS has been available on some of the MFPs, a firmware update will allow for newer and better versions of TLS to be used. But what is TLS?

TLS is a cryptographic protocol that is used to encrypt data sent and received. TLS is a spiritual successor of Secure Socket Layers, or SSL. SSL is also a cryptographic protocol. While they are not the exactly the same, TLS is the modern version of SSL. So why are these important? SSL and TLS both protect against hackers gaining access to information by encrypting it.

For Konica Minolta, this is important as the information being sent to and from a printer could be confidential or personal, and having the cryptographic protocol and the encryption to help prevent hackers from being able to crack or intercept the document or data is important. Konica Minolta has taken steps like this in the past with security, like the fact that they started using solid state drives (SSDs) instead of hard disk drives (HDDs) because they could delete the information of the SSD and allow for better security and privacy.