DocuShield: A Volatile Memory Spooling Architecture for Mitigating Data Remanence in Commercial Print Environments

Commercial printing environments, commonly known as "Xerox shops," process thousands of sensitive documents daily, including government identity cards, financial records, and medical reports. Standard operating systems handle these print jobs by temporarily writing spool files to non-volatile storage (HDDs or SSDs). Even after the print job completes and the file is logically deleted, the raw data remains on the disk and can be recovered using basic forensic tools, exposing citizens to identity theft and fraud. This paper proposes DocuShield, a zero-cost, localized software architecture that reroutes print spooling entirely into volatile memory (RAM). A working prototype was implemented using a dependency-free Python backend and a React-based kiosk interface: customers scan a QR code to upload a document, which is written exclusively to a RAM-backed temporary file system; after printing, a cryptographic zero-fill sanitization overwrites the exact memory addresses used by the file. Preliminary validation confirms that uploaded documents leave no recoverable residue on non-volatile storage. The architecture requires no internet connection, no centralized server, and operates on existing print-shop hardware, offering a scalable, serverless solution for local data privacy.