How to Open Password Protected PDF Documents
There are sometimes genuine reasons to unlock or crack a password protected PDF file. You have the legal right to open the encrypted PDF document but forgot the password like in the case below.Say one of your former colleague created some critical sales reports in PDF format but he is not working with the company anymore. In his absence, you have no option but to crack the PDF password in order to open, read or print these PDF files.
There are basically two types of PDF protection - the original PDF creator can either restrict opening the PDF file itself or he can restrict others from modifying, printing or copying text and graphics from the PDF file. Here are a few possible workarounds:
When there are Copying or Printing Restrictions..
Say you want to print a couple of pages from the PDF document but the document settings won't let you do that.
Open the document in Acrobat Reader or Foxit and capture the PDF page as an image using any free screen capture software. If there are multiple pages, you may try SnagIt since it can autoscroll and capture multiple pages of the document in one-go.
If you want to copy just a portion of text from some PDF page, use a screen capture tool with OCR features (like Kleptomania, Capture Text discussed here)
Alternatively, you can invest in commercial solutions like Advanced PDF Password Recovery from ElcomSoft and PDF Password Remover from Very PDF.
(These utilities may not recover the password for you - they'll just remove the restrictions from the password protected file)
When there are Document Opening Restrictions..
This is a very tricky case and there's no straight-forward solution to read PDF documents that are password-protected at the Open level.
The software will use methods like Brute Force, Key Search and Dictionary Attack to guess the password. They will try to use all possible character combinations as the password and so the process might take hours or even days and would really depend on your computer's processing power.
Advanced PDF Password Recovery Professional edition from ElcomSoft is a recommended option. When (if) the password is found, the program shows it, as well as the number of passwords which have been tested, and the program speed.
Legal Issues: - you maybe surprised to learn that these PDF password cracking software are absolutely legal and Microsoft even awarded ElcomSoft a Gold Certified Partner status.
Related: Remove Watermarks from Adobe PDF Documents
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Reader Comments:
Is there a way like this to open password protected excel sheet
Wow i dint know they are legal thanks for the info :) good as always.
Regards
I have a PDF file that is protected with a password. It's actually a magazine scanned in PDF which I downloaded from some book warez site. I tried the brute force method to crack the pdf password but it's takign some time. Will post if the process is successful.
You know those sites post the password in the item description/NFO file right?
If the needs is printing the pdf document, i think we can use pdf-to-words converter.
Then we print it in words.
how it can be done?
we can use zamzar[dot]com or any commercial converter tools.
Doesn't help for e-books that you happened to purchase on one copy of windows, and then had to do a reinstall. D: I hate DRM. :(
Cracking with the brute force method will likely not work in your lifetime. PDF encryption in later versions uses the AES encryption algorithm in the 128 bit strength. I have written a few blog articles on this subject.
On Mac OS X you can open your pdf in ColorSync and resave as pdf and it will remove any password protection. This does not work on pdfs that require password to open them. ColorSync is a free utility included with all versions of OS X.
I had a document that didn't allow printing to any network printer or to Cute PDF. It would only print to a device on LPT1 and only if the print driver was not set to "print to file." The way I got around it in Windows was to set up an HP LaserJet 4 Postscript as my LPT printer but not have anything hooked to the printer port. I set the printer driver to raw and then printed the document. The raw postscript file will then be queued in C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS . Grab that file, open it with Ghostscript, convert to PDF and BAM! you have a PDF with no DRM. Then do a little dance and feel crafty, baby, crafty!
IF you just want to print a PDF document that does not allow printing instead of the screen capture method use a toold like omniprint that converts PDF documents to highres images and print those (or OCR those)
google "omniformat"
In addition of commercial tools
mentioned above I've found the almost free PDF password remover software - GuaPDF. The author just asks for a link to his site.
@ D Nickull, who wrote
"Cracking with the brute force method will likely not work in your lifetime."
That would be true if the Password crackers were going after the raw document key* actually used to encrypt the PDF file. However the utilities cited in this article are going after the passwords which are considerably weaker. Most people choose passwords that are 6-8 characters in length and are printable ASCII which limits the keyspace and makes brute force searching computationally feasible.
BTW it doesn't matter for RC4 and AES the key derivation function for Password Security is the same.
i m a mac user and i have a password protected pdf file how can i break the passwoed if i don't know the password plz help
you could also try opening the pdf with gsview and then converting to another pdf without protection (file > convert > pdfwrite). i've done this before using a time-protected pdf which had timed out (acrobat gave a green screen and the new pdf [after using gsview] was then viewable in acrobat).
you'll need to install ghostscript first, then gsview (search google for them).
i have a pdf document which is password protected for opening. its a file created by my colleague and he has left the organization.now i am in commotion as it is pretty urgent and my job depends over it...can u help me????
You can convert your pdf file to a ps file and then convert it back to a pdf file.
Linux comes with pdftops and pstopdf inbuilt commands. On Windows, you can use ghostscript or the GUI solution FreePDFXP which needs ghostscript to be installed anyway.
I use Brava! Reader (it's FREE)to by-pass print restrictions of PDFs. What I do is open the protected PDF in Brava! Reader and reprint the file as a new PDF. It works everytime.
Its great to know we can legally open a password protected pdf file.
Is there any way of protecting a pdf. I have just written my first ebook and would like to know if there is any way of protecting it. Is it a good idea to save it as a zip file in an obscure folder? I would be grateful for any feedback.
There isn't a way to protect anything that you can open on your pc, sorry. As for removing restrictions (on printing, etc.), the pdf standard makes it rather trivial.
"On Mac OS X you can open your pdf in ColorSync and resave as pdf and it will remove any password protection. This does not work on pdfs that require password to open them. ColorSync is a free utility included with all versions of OS X."
This is the easiest way by far!!!!
Guaranteed PDF Decryptor (GuaPDF) Restrictions Remover is to enable copying, editing, printing etc on any PDF protected document (you should have the right to do it, for example, if you forgot the password). PDF permission password removal is an instant process. Any Acrobat version up to 8 is supported, even with 128-bit AES or RC4 encryption. Decrypted file can be opened in any PDF viewer without any restrictions so you may edit/copy/print it. Only standard PDF security is supported, neither third-party plug-ins nor e-books
I used a little tool called A-PDF Restriction Removera. It's shareware, but the free trial worked fine. If I need it again, I'd be glad to pay $9.99 for it.
To the guy suggesting ColorSync Utility in OSX to open passwd protected files. You f*cking rule!
So goddamn easy, and it's all in the OS itself. :)
I wonder if anyone is working on removing the Vitrium overlay DRM. I want to be able to read the PDFs on my PDA but cannot use my password on a PDA. University of Phoenix ebooks have this Vitrium DRM. What's interesting about it is that when scrolling down the document text and pictures are momentarily visible.
I was actually able to copy the entire document to clipboard and past into a word document then convert back to PDF to read the document on my PDA, but I want to actually defeat this DRM.
Is there a way to open user protected pdf files on a mac (os x 10.3) besides just bruteforcing? These are the ones you can't open at all without the password. Isn't there some way to just extract the data?
ColorSync method didn't work for me - produced a pdf with all blank pages! Brava Reader worked a treat for printing though!
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