Re: Arrrggghhh...Changing a secured PDF

Subject: Re: Arrrggghhh...Changing a secured PDF
From: Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 02 Jul 2001 23:15:00 -0400

Ruth Lundquist wrote:
>
> I have a PDF file from another entity that has been encrypted. ...
>
> I have tried everything--printing a page range, saving as another file,
> deleting the page--but I don't have access to these neat features because
> of the security!!! Arrrggghhh.
>
> Does anyone know how I can delete this &*%$#!! useless page from the PDF
> file?
>
> (And no, I don't have access to the source document or the author, which is
> probably a good thing considering I'm feeling a tad homicidal right now.)

If you're willing to pay for the service, some places to try are:

http://www.crackpassword.com/
http://www.elcomsoft.com/prs.html
http://www.ashishsystems.com/pages/products.htm
http://www.lostpassword.com/

These companies will, for a fee, break passwords for:

most MS-Office components (Word, Excel, Access, ...)
Zip, Visio, Outlook, ...
NT or 2000 user passwords
Quicken, Quickbooks
Acrobat
some Lotus, Borland, Corel, Symantec products

There is also quite a bit of free software around for doing similar
things, but perhaps not for as broad a range of targets. Example:

http://www.password-crackers.com/crack.html

What I find scary about this is not that the cracking services are so
readily available but that major companies ship such defective products.

If you see any product that includes encryption that is:

either sold by a company whose primary business is not security
or written by people who have not been trained in the field

then the odds are that the product is utter rubbish, and will be
quickly broken by the first professional that tries.

For some reasons for this, see Schneier's "Why Cryptography is
Harder than it Looks" paper:
http://www.counterpane.com/whycrypto.html

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Follow-Ups:

References:
Arrrggghhh...Changing a secured PDF: From: Ruth Lundquist

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