AFP Consortium recommends TLS 1.3 for IPDS communication encryption


​BOULDER, Colo., December 17, 2025 – The Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) Consortium, an international consortium of print and presentation industry stakeholders working together to further enhance the AFP document architecture, announced its recommendation to use Transport Layer Security (TLS) version 1.3 to enhance security of IPDS communications in a new document, “Recommended Method to Encrypt IPDS Communications.”
 
“As security expectations evolve across the industry, organizations are prioritizing stronger safeguards for every layer of their document and data workflows—and ensuring secure IPDS communication is an essential part of that commitment,” said Dennis Carney, President, AFP Consortium. “Standardizing on TLS 1.3 provides implementations and end users with a clear, reliable way to secure IPDS communication in diverse environments without compromising the functionality of their AFP workflows.”
 
The recommendation to use TLS—a widely-used and highly-trusted method for securing network communications—applies to IPDS implementations that require secure communication by encrypting both directions of the bidirectional IPDS communication. Having TLS 1.3 support in common enables IPDS implementations to communicate securely. The recommendation document includes information on the default port number for secure IPDS connections, although implementations should allow the end user to specify a different port number to match their network configuration, if necessary.
 
Using a secure IPDS connection via TLS does not impact:
  • existing, unencrypted IPDS functionality
  • IPDS content flow
  • the protocol for connection and bidirectional IPDS communication
 
The recommendation expressly excludes specific details about the way TLS should be used to enable diversity of IPDS implementation, and to enable end users to customize a secure configuration in a manner that befits their network and needs.
 
For more information, please refer to, “Recommended Method to Encrypt IPDS Communications” (publication number AFPC-0019-01) on the AFP Consortium website: www.afpconsortium.org/publications.html.
 
About AFP and the AFP Consortium
Advanced Function Presentation is a document architecture that offers performance, manageability and integrity benefits meeting the needs of large volume, variable data applications. AFP technology has historically been used to produce mission critical documents such as bills, statements and policies and contains methods for job ticketing, effective server-based resource management and the powerful Intelligent Printer Data Stream (IPDS) for total output integrity. In addition to being a rich, self-contained native document language, AFP is also a powerful container architecture capable of bringing full resource and production management capabilities to bear on encapsulated formats such as PDF and TIFF.
 
The AFP Consortium is an international open standards body consisting of over 30 companies committed to the continued development of the AFP architecture. Since 2004, the AFP Consortium has developed open standards for accurate and consistent ICC-based color management, high-speed complex text, page group recovery within high-volume production, the IS/3 interchange set for compliance, and metadata support for AFP Archive and future applications such as accessibility features, as well as many other functionalities. The AFP Consortium will continue in its role to grow and maintain the complete set of AFP architecture.
 
For more information, visit the AFP Consortium website: https://www.afpconsortium.org.