PDF: The Aerial trick
(How to crack any pdf security setting)

by JimBob

(31 October 1997)

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Courtesy of Fravia's page of reverse engineering

Well, short and directly to the point, I added some info about Aerial code at the end

Hi,

 I visited your site last night and saw the info on 

cracking Acrobat and PDFs. I've been interested in this file format 

for awhile now since it is such a versitile format.  I would like to 

suggest another aspect of PDF cracking, extracting embedded fonts.



Also, 

I have discovered that as long as you can open a pdf, text extraction 

is no problem, no matter what the security settings are. I extracted 

ghiric7.pdf text without a hitch.  The secret is a free plugin for 

exchange from Ambia (www.ambia.com).  It allows extracting the text 

to RTF format, and will do so even if selecting, printing, modifying 

etc are all pw protected, it doesnt matter, it still extracts it.  It 

is supposed to extract the pictures too, but I've found that it's 

just not that good at it.



You must first run Exchange and laod a PDF, then activate the aerial 

toolbar.  Close the file and the toolbar stays active.  Now even if 

you load say gharic7.pdf, which makes the Acrobat toolbar disappear, 

the Ambia plugin stays active, select Extract to RTF and the text is 

yours. Oh yea the plugin is called Aerial.



Can't wait to see how this project comes out!



					JimBob

                    


Some of you may like to know that inside Aerial there are some
 

cmp dword ptr (eax+6CH), 1Eh 


And that 1Eh (0x1E) corresponds to Decimal 30, like 30 days... and yes, there 

is also another protection scheme there, as stupid as this one.

Back to the PDF-Project

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