Latest / The Windows Podcast with Fexingo: Microsoft, PC, and Enterprise Windows Conversations / Windows 11 Quietly Mandates Enterprise Printer Driver Isolation
Transcript
- Lucas: Microsoft is making a fairly fundamental change to how printing works in Windows 11 with the 24H2 update, and if you manage printers for a living, this one is going to show up on your dashboard pretty soon. Luna: I saw the preview documentation — it's all about driver isolation, right? Every third-party printer driver has to run in a separate container now. Lucas: Exactly. Starting with 24H2, every printer driver that isn't a Microsoft inbox driver must run isolated from the Windows print spooler. That means the driver lives in its own sandboxed process, with no direct access to system memory or to other drivers. It's a direct response to PrintNightmare. Luna: PrintNightmare — the vulnerability from 2021 that let attackers get system-level access through the print spooler. That was a nasty one. Lucas: Right. And Microsoft patched it multiple times, but the fundamental architectural issue was that printer drivers ran inside the spooler process itself. If a malicious driver — or a compromised driver — was loaded, it had full access to the spooler's privileges. Isolation is the real fix. Luna: So what does this mean for the average enterprise IT team? I'm thinking about the network printer at a law firm, or the label printer in a warehouse. Lucas: It means a lot of those printers are going to stop working unless the driver is compatible with isolation. Microsoft has been warning about this for a while — they started enforcing isolation as a soft requirement in earlier builds — but 24H2 makes it mandatory. If a driver doesn't support isolation, Windows will block it from loading. Luna: And I'm guessing most third-party drivers aren't ready yet. Especially for older printers. Lucas: That's the key issue. Printer manufacturers have been slow to update their drivers. A lot of them rely on what's called a 'type 3' driver, which is the legacy model that runs inside the spooler. The newer 'type 4' driver architecture already supports isolation, but the industry hasn't fully migrated. If you're running a Canon or Ricoh or HP printer that's more than three years old, there's a decent chance the driver is type 3. Luna: So IT teams need to audit their printer fleet and figure out which drivers are type 3 versus type 4. Is there a tool for that? Lucas: Microsoft does provide a PowerShell command — Get-PrinterDriver — that shows the driver type. If it says '3' under DriverType, you have work to do. But the real test is actually installing the driver on a Windows 11 24H2 machine and seeing if it loads. If you see an error saying the driver is blocked, you need a newer version or a different driver. Luna: And if the vendor doesn't offer a type 4 driver? Then what? Lucas: Then you have two options. One: switch to Microsoft's Universal Print driver, which is a type 4 inbox driver that works with many network printers. It's not perfect — it may not support advanced features like finishers or staplers — but it handles basic printing. Option two: use the printer's native IPP support, if it has it. Internet Printing Protocol is the modern standard, and Windows 11 is pushing hard in that direction. Luna: Interesting. So the mandate is really about driver architecture, not about the printer hardware itself. You can keep the hardware, just change the driver. Lucas: Exactly. And in some cases, you can even use the same type 3 driver if the manufacturer releases a security-compliant version. But the deadline is essentially the 24H2 rollout, which for enterprises will be sometime in late 2025 or early 2026. Microsoft typically gives businesses a bit of a grace period, but the feature update itself will enforce isolation. Luna: I want to talk about the other side of this — the deprecation of legacy TCP/IP port monitors. I read that Windows is also dropping the standard TCP/IP printer port monitor in favor of the new WSD and IPP ports. Lucas: Right. The old 'Standard TCP/IP Port' monitor — the one that's been in Windows since the Windows 95 days — is being deprecated. It's still present in 24H2, but Microsoft has indicated it will be removed in a future release. The replacement is the 'Network Printer' port, which uses Web Services for Devices, or WSD, or IPP. That's a significant change for any IT admin who has dozens of printers configured with static IP addresses and raw port 9100. Luna: Port 9100 — that's the HP JetDirect protocol, basically raw TCP printing. It's everywhere in enterprise environments. Lucas: It's still the most common way to print across corporate networks. But it's also insecure — no encryption, no authentication, just raw data. Microsoft is essentially forcing a move to IPP, which supports encryption and authentication. So the driver isolation mandate and the port monitor deprecation are two sides of the same security coin. Luna: Let me play devil's advocate here. Are these changes causing more pain than they prevent? Because I talk to IT admins who say they spend hours reconfiguring printers every time Microsoft tweaks the printing stack. Lucas: It's a fair point. The PrintNightmare vulnerability was serious — it was being actively exploited in the wild. But the fix is disruptive. For a small business with one printer, it's probably a non-issue. For a hospital with hundreds of label printers, barcode scanners, and patient wristband printers? That's a huge coordination effort. You need to test every single driver, and if a critical printer — say, a medication label printer — doesn't have a type 4 driver, you're stuck. Luna: So the practical advice for IT teams right now is to start testing on a Windows 11 24H2 machine as soon as possible. Not wait until the update hits your fleet. Lucas: Absolutely. And Microsoft has a tool called the Printer Migration Tool that helps you identify affected printers. There's also the Print Server Migration Guide on Microsoft Learn. The worst thing you can do is assume everything will work and then have a printing outage on day one of the update. Luna: One thing I find interesting is that Microsoft is essentially pushing enterprises toward cloud-based printing with Universal Print. That's a subscription service, and it changes the cost model for printing. Lucas: It does. Universal Print is part of Microsoft 365, so if you're already on an E3 or E5 license, you have some included capacity. But for heavy print environments, you might need additional capacity, and that's a monthly cost. The shift from a one-time printer purchase to a per-page or per-user subscription is a significant change, and some organizations are resisting it. Luna: But if Universal Print supports type 4 drivers and handles the isolation automatically, that could save IT teams a lot of time. It's a trade-off between cost and convenience. Lucas: And security, which is really what this is all about. Microsoft is telling the industry: if you want to print from Windows 11, you have to do it in a secure way. No more unauthenticated, unencrypted printing. No more drivers running with system privileges. It's a long overdue change, but the transition is going to be messy. Luna: I want to ask about something I noticed in the 24H2 release notes — the deprecation of the Point and Print feature. That's the one that lets users install printer drivers from a server automatically. Lucas: Yes, Point and Print has been restricted since the PrintNightmare patches. In 24H2, Microsoft is turning off the default behavior that allows driver installation from a print server without administrator approval. That means when a user connects to a shared printer, they'll see a UAC prompt asking for admin credentials. For IT departments that rely on Point and Print to push drivers to hundreds of desktops, that's a workflow change. Luna: There is a Group Policy setting to allow silent installation, but it requires explicitly adding trusted print servers. So it's not a hard block, but it's a shift from 'allow all' to 'allow specific.' Lucas: That's exactly right. And this ties back to driver isolation — the whole stack is being hardened. The message from Microsoft is clear: printing is a security boundary, and they're treating it as such. Luna: We talk about this a lot on the show — how Microsoft uses security vulnerabilities as leverage to push architectural changes. PrintNightmare gave them the justification to mandate driver isolation and deprecate old protocols. Lucas: It's a pattern. Remember how they used the EternalBlue exploit to push SMB signing? Same playbook. And from a security perspective, it's hard to argue against. But the implementation timeline can be brutal for IT teams that don't have the resources to test and migrate. Luna: If today's conversation gave you something usable — a checklist item for your next printer audit, or a reason to check your driver types — that's exactly why we do this show. We deliberately don't run ads on these episodes, because we want the information to be the product. If you find that valuable and you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. No pressure, just a way to keep this ad-free. Lucas: Yeah, it's a small way to keep the show independent. And honestly, it helps us spend more time on these deep-dive topics. Okay, back to printers — I want to talk about one more thing: the impact on production printing environments. Luna: You mean like high-volume print shops or industrial label printers? Lucas: Exactly. These environments often use specialized drivers that are highly customized — for example, a printer that applies adhesive labels at high speed might use a driver that communicates directly with the firmware. Those drivers are almost always type 3, and the vendor may not have a type 4 version. In that case, the IT team needs to work with the vendor to get a compliant driver, or consider using a print server running an older version of Windows Server that still supports type 3 drivers. Luna: But that's not a permanent solution. Windows Server 2025 also enforces driver isolation, so at some point, the server itself will require type 4 drivers. Lucas: Right. The long-term answer is to adopt IPP printers that don't need vendor-specific drivers at all. Many newer printers support IPP Everywhere, which means Windows can use the Microsoft IPP Class Driver, a type 4 inbox driver. If you're buying new printers today, you should make sure they support IPP Everywhere. That future-proofs you against these driver changes. Luna: And for existing printers, the recommendation is to check for firmware updates that enable IPP support. Some older printers can get IPP via a firmware upgrade. Lucas: Yes. And if the printer is too old for that, you might need to replace it. But that's a capital expense that many organizations want to delay. So the practical path is: first, audit your drivers. Second, test with 24H2. Third, identify the critical printers that need replacement. And fourth, plan a migration to ipp based printing over the next 12 to 18 months. Luna: That's a solid roadmap. And it's not just about Windows — the same changes are coming to Windows Server, so even if you're using a print server, you'll need to comply. Lucas: Exactly. Microsoft is aligning the whole ecosystem. Windows 11, Windows Server 2025, and even the cloud print services are all moving toward a unified, isolated, ipp centered printing model. It's a big shift, but it's also a rare opportunity to clean up years of printer configuration debt. Luna: I like that framing — printer configuration debt. A lot of IT teams have printers that were set up years ago and just kept working. Now they have a reason to revisit that configuration. Lucas: And they should. Because the security benefits are real. If you've ever dealt with a printer-related breach — and there have been several — you know that printers are often the weakest link on the network. This mandate closes a significant attack vector. Luna: So for our listeners who are IT admins: start testing now. Don't wait for the update to hit your fleet. And if you need a starting point, the Microsoft documentation on printer driver isolation is actually quite good. Lucas: I'll link to it in the show notes. And I think the takeaway is: printing is changing, and it's changing for good reason. The transition will be painful, but the end state is a more secure printing environment.