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April 18, 2006

"PDF DRM"

"PDF DRM": This set of articles hit Memeorandum earlier today, but I held off in reply in order to check whether anyone on the Acrobat team had anything on it. Apparently the author was able to copy/paste text in an Adobe Acrobat PDF file, even though the permissions had been set for this as a read-only document, by using Google's "View as HTML" translation. The problem is in the term "DRM" -- it's not just one thing. Here the author intends it as "change the permission bits for copy/edits"... in other senses it could mean "accept a password for local decryption" (the SWF8 docs are an example of such local control, here using a license agreement rather than a password as the opening key)... but in other senses it's the whole serverside rights-management of Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server, where the document calls home to your server to determine who has which privileges on which documents at which times. The author's title of "Circumvent PDF DRM... with Gmail!" is a little loose logically -- just as with "Protect from Import" in a SWF file, alternate renderers may ignore permission bits set within a file. Sending a password or other sensitive data within a file is not as protected as relying on a live relationship between the file and your server, a lock-and-key arrangement.

Posted by John Dowdell at April 18, 2006 02:10 PM

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Comments

Documents secured with Adobes LiveCycle Policy Server can be stripped of their security without using GMail. You can print the PDF document to XPS or another file format and then distill it back to PDF again if you want. Or if printing is not allowed just try screen grabbing - it works a treat and you can automate this really quickly with most screen grabbing tools. So it does not matter if there are controls set to check a server when you can bypass the controls locally pretty quickly anyway. So no matter what way you look at it, Adobe DRM does not work.

[jd sez: Hi, you're in an old blogpost. You can also read the document to a speech-recognition engine. Doorlocks were under constant evolution, for awhile.]

Posted by: Bryan at April 10, 2008 05:14 PM