pdfcrack-ng is a simple tool written in C to recover forgotten passwords from PDFs.

It should be able to handle all PDFs that uses the standard security handler but the PDF-parsing routines are a bit hacky. You might stumble across some PDFs where the parser needs to be fixed to handle them.

• Owner- and/or user-passwords with the Standard Security Handler revision 2, 3 and 5.
• Multithreading enabled by default.
• Search by wordlist or brute-forcing with auto or specific charset.
• Search by:
  • Optimized search for owner-password when user-password is known or unset.
  • Simple optional permutation of passwords which makes first letter uppercase.

When brute-forcing with charsets:

• It auto-saves the current state when interrupted (Ctrl-C or SIGINT to the process) and resumes on next try.
• Optional minimum password length
• Optional maximum password length

You don't need any external libraries. Just run:

$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ..           # or 'gmake ..' if you have BSD-make as default
$ cmake --build .    # you will find the binaries in "build/bin/"
$ sudo cmake --install .

• Sort your wordlist by length for best performance and consider, that almost all passwords in PDFs are in iso latin 1. Use the correct character encoding in your terminal and/or wordlist when using special characters.
• To build a package for multi CPU envelopment remove -march=native and -mtune=native from the CMakeLists.txt.

This repository uses SemVer for its release cycle.

This repository uses the git-flow branching model by Vincent Driessen. It has two branches with infinite lifetime:

• master
• develop

The master branch gets updated on every release. The develop branch is the merging branch.

Copyright © 2016-2021 Michael Sasser Info@MichaelSasser.org. Released under the GPLv3 license.
Copyright © 2006-2015 Henning Norén.
Copyright © 2009-2009 Andreas Meier and Michael Kuhn.
Copyright © 1996-2005 Glyph & Cog, LLC.

Code and documentation are originally written by Henning Norén and extended by Andreas Meier and Michael Kuhn. Henning Norén was inspired by xpdf and poppler and derived/copied parts of them to pdfcrack.c and md5.c.

xpdfand and poppler are Copyright © 1995 Glyph & Cog, LLC.

The PDF data structures, operators, and specification are &copy Copyright 1985 Adobe Systems Inc.