Measure print servers and artifact repositories as separate asset classes, then compare them using consistent governance questions: what is exposed, why it must be reachable, who can change it, how its integrity is checked, and whether suspicious activity can be detected and investigated. An internet-reachable system is not automatically vulnerable, and a vulnerability is not proof of compromise. Keeping those findings distinct is essential to a useful attack-surface assessment.
What should an attack-surface assessment measure?
Start with observable facts about each asset, rather than a single label such as “exposed” or a combined risk score. Record the system’s reachability, operational purpose, owner, identities and privileges, support and patch state, integrity controls, logging, and response readiness. Also map what depends on it: a compromised print-management service can affect its connected environment, while a tampered artifact may reach downstream software consumers.
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These systems perform different jobs and have different threat paths. A print-management server administers print workflows and related configuration; an artifact repository stores or proxies software components used in builds and deployments. Their measures can be compared as governance questions, but the evidence here does not establish a validated common score or population-wide comparison of exposure rates.
Measure each asset class on its own terms
| Measurement area | Print-management servers | Artifact repositories |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory and reachability | Record the print-management application and associated services, product version, owner, network zone, administrative interfaces, and dependencies. Distinguish public-internet access from partner-network, user-segment, management-enclave, or isolated access. | Inventory hosted and proxy repositories, registries, package feeds, container-image stores, service accounts, automation clients, and build/deploy integrations. Include provider-hosted and internal instances; map which teams and build agents can read, publish, overwrite, delete, or promote artifacts. |
| Operational necessity | Document the business workflow, user population, service owner, and reason for each externally or broadly reachable service. Determine whether access can be narrowed without interrupting that workflow. | Decide whether anonymous or broad read access is intended, who needs publish or replacement rights, and whether build systems can retrieve dependencies from unapproved sources or bypass the controlled repository. |
| Identity and privilege | Count privileged accounts and service identities; review default or shared credentials, authentication paths, MFA coverage, administrative interfaces, and who can change scripts, drivers, queues, synchronization settings, or other configuration. | Review human and machine identities separately. Measure least privilege, separation of duties, publisher permissions, token lifetime, credential storage and rotation, and who can alter or release artifacts. |
| Vulnerability and support state | Track product and version, support status, exposed components, known vulnerabilities, remediation owner, and time to remediate. Keep vulnerability status distinct from network exposure and evidence of exploitation. | Include the repository manager and its supporting identity provider, CI/CD integrations, build agents, plugins, and artifact consumers in version, support, and vulnerability reviews. |
| Integrity and provenance | Track who changed administration settings, scripts, drivers, and integrations; whether changes are attributable; and whether a known-good configuration can be recovered. | Check review or scanning before admission, immutable release behavior where supported, separation of upload from approval, signature validation, and provenance linking an artifact to its source and build process. |
| Detection, response, and blast radius | Check whether authentication, privilege changes, configuration changes, and suspicious access are logged, monitored, retained, and actionable. Map the users and systems that rely on the service. | Check logging of authentication, configuration changes, publication, deletion, and suspicious access. Map downstream projects and deployments that may consume an affected artifact, and whether the team can trace and investigate that use. |
OWASP recommends reviewing artifacts before admitting them to a private repository and ensuring teams cannot bypass that repository where it is intended to control software-supply-chain inputs. NIST Special Publication 800-204D, published February 12, 2024, treats supply-chain security as a set of measures integrated across CI/CD stages including build, test, package, and deploy. Those stages make repository controls only one part of the software path to examine.
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How to run the assessment
- Build the inventory. Identify assets from ownership records, service and build configurations, network observations, and relevant discovery resources. Mark each as confirmed, likely but unconfirmed, or unknown-owner/status; record the date and method of observation. A discovery scan alone is not a complete inventory. CISA advises assessing internet exposure and describes specialized search platforms for internet-connected assets, but does not endorse one tool.
- Verify reachability and necessity. For each service, record observed access paths and the business reason for them. CISA’s Internet Exposure Reduction Guidance, published June 4, 2025, recommends identifying internet-accessible assets, deciding which exposure is operationally necessary, reducing unnecessary exposure, mitigating exposure that must remain, and assessing routinely. Where public access is not needed, remove it or restrict access. Where it is needed, consider controls such as VPN or other access restrictions, MFA where available, patching, and monitored access.
- Map identities to actions. For both systems, tie human and machine accounts to specific capabilities and owners. Identify who can administer, publish, replace, promote, or delete, and whether any shared or default credentials remain. For repositories, OWASP recommends access control and least privilege, MFA, credential rotation, and keeping credentials out of clear text and source control.
- Check support and remediation. Record product versions, support status, known vulnerabilities, exposed components, responsible remediation owners, and remediation timing. Assess relevant integrations and dependent systems, not just the visible server. NIST SP 800-204D provides a pipeline-wide framing for integrating software-supply-chain security measures across build, test, package, and deploy.
- Test integrity controls. For repositories, establish whether signatures are checked before use and whether provenance identifies where, when, and how an artifact was produced. OWASP says provenance should be verifiable, generated by the build platform, and difficult to forge. CISA developer guidance calls for retaining build artifacts and identifies the source repository, third-party dependencies, build script, and output as useful build records. For print systems, review accountability for configuration changes and whether a known-good state can be restored.
- Validate monitoring and response. Confirm that relevant authentication, privilege, configuration, and artifact events are centrally monitored, retained, and tied to an actionable alert or investigation path—not merely collected. Record a named owner, escalation route, patch process, alert coverage, log-retention period, incident playbook, and last review date. CISA recommends routine exposure assessments and monitoring ingress and egress for anomalous traffic on systems that remain exposed.
What the PaperCut incident demonstrates—and what it does not
In its advisory on CVE-2023-27350, CISA and the FBI documented malicious actors exploiting PaperCut MF and NG servers. CISA described an authentication bypass that could provide administrator access, followed by opportunities to use product features for remote code execution. In the configurations described, the PaperCut server process ran with SYSTEM- or root-level privileges, increasing the potential consequences of code execution. The advisory directs defenders to review unfamiliar print scripts and User/Group Sync settings.
CISA, citing FBI information in 2023, reported that Education Facilities Subsector entities maintained approximately 68% of exposed, but not necessarily vulnerable, U.S.-based PaperCut servers. That figure describes the distribution of exposed U.S.-based PaperCut servers in the advisory’s incident context. It does not mean that 68% of education-sector servers were vulnerable, that 68% of all print servers were exposed, or that the same distribution holds today. The affected version ranges in that advisory are historical incident evidence; check the vendor’s current security advisory before using them to judge present product status.
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Keep observation, assessment, and incident evidence in separate fields. This lets teams prioritize real remediation without treating every internet-visible service as an exploitable weakness—or treating a vulnerability as proof that an attacker succeeded.
| Finding | What to record | What it does not establish by itself |
|---|---|---|
| Reachability | Observed source or network zone, destination service, observation date, and verification method. | That the service is vulnerable or compromised. |
| Vulnerability or support issue | Product/version, affected component, evidence source, support state, remediation owner, and target or actual fix date. | That the vulnerable path is reachable or has been exploited. |
| Integrity or access-control gap | The control that is absent or ineffective, the identities or artifacts in scope, and the evidence reviewed. | That malicious changes or access have occurred. |
| Suspected or confirmed compromise | Observed indicators or incident evidence, affected assets and artifacts, investigation status, and response owner. | A broader claim about other systems or the asset class without supporting evidence. |
Report discovery coverage and uncertainty alongside counts: known assets, likely but unconfirmed assets, and systems with unknown ownership or status. No comparable prevalence rate for artifact repositories, or validated cross-category score spanning repositories and print servers, is established by the cited guidance and incident evidence. If an organization creates an internal score, it should document its weights, evidence quality, and how unlike controls are normalized; otherwise, report the measured dimensions separately.
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