PDFs: overriding "You cannot save data typed into this form"?

Adam Funk a24061 at ducksburg.com
Thu Jul 30 09:36:55 UTC 2009


On 2009-07-29, Chris Mohler wrote:

> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Adam Funk<a24061 at ducksburg.com> wrote:
>
>> I've had pdfcrack running (in the default mode) on another machine for
>> several hours now.  Wish me luck.
>>
>> I tried it with the -w /etc/dictionaries-common/words option: it
>> finished very quickly with failure.  Does that just try each word in
>> the file, but not concatenations of them?
>
> I don't remember for sure, but that sounds right.  pdfcrack uses brute
> force, so it can be quite time consuming - as I mentioned before, I
> usually do a run of digits only first, then one run with digits and
> the characters present in the filename.  If the password is
> alphanumeric, the decryption will take quite some time if the password
> is over 4 chars long, so then it's a toss-up: go ahead and do one
> last, long run with all chars or take a chance that it's alphanumeric.

Is there a fixed limit to the length of a PDF password?

> At least you have a spare machine ;)

Well, not exactly.





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