What is the purpose/benifits of restricting users from installing printer drivers?
The main purpose of restricting users from installing printer drivers is to prevent them from installing and using unauthorized printer drivers. This is done to protect the user’s system and ensure that they get the best performance out of their device.
Benefits of restricting
- This prevents the users from installing any malicious software that might be on the driver.
- Another benefit is that it saves time for IT staff because they can install the drivers at one central location and not have to worry about them being installed elsewhere.
- This restriction also prevents people from using printers that are not compatible with their computers, which means they won’t waste time troubleshooting why their printer isn’t working.
- This restriction will also mitigate Windows Print Spooler Remote execution vulnerability
How can I restrict users from installing printer drivers?
We can restrict printer driver installation only to Administrators by following these steps. This will help System Administrators to prevent users from installing singed or unsinged printer drivers downloaded from the Internet.
Printer drivers are software that allows a computer to communicate with a printer. They are essential for printing documents and photos. However, they can be problematic if you want to restrict users from installing them on your computer.
There are two ways to restrict printer drivers:
Option 1) Restricting the installation of the driver by using Group Policy Objects (GPOs).
Navigate to Computer Configuration -> Windows Settings-> Security Settings ->Local Policies ->Secutiry Options
Double click “Devices: Prevent users from installing printer drivers” and select “Disabled“, press the OK button to save the configuration.
Option 2) Restricting the installation of the driver by using Registry keys.
Enable Administrator Only Printer Driver Installation
Add this registry value “RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrators” and change the value to 1.
- Open command prompt (cmd.exe) as Administrator
- Copy and paste the following command to Command Prompt and press enter key to add this registry key and change the value to 1.
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers\PointAndPrint" /v RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrators /t REG_DWORD /d 1 /f
How To Allow Non Administrator Users To Install Printer Drivers?
What if there was a way for all your users to install print drivers? Drivers would automatically be installed on the user’s PC whenever they plugged in the printer and started using it. Not only would this save you time when configuring new PCs, but it would also save you from having to reinstall drivers after an OS reinstall.
After installing the July 2021 and later updates, non-administrators, including delegated admin groups like printer operators, cannot install signed and unsigned printer drivers to a print server. This was to mitigate PrintNightmare vulnerability. So in order to allow nonadministrators to install Printer drivers in your systems, you can change the value of registry key RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrators to 0.
- Open command prompt (cmd.exe) as Administrator
- Copy and paste the following command to Command Prompt and press enter key to add this registry key and change the value to 1.
reg add "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers\PointAndPrint" /v RestrictDriverInstallationToAdministrators /t REG_DWORD /d 0 /f
