Password Protection

While PDF format makes it excellent choice to share documents and electronic forms with users, sometimes there is need to protect PDF contents from strangers. There are numerous situations including PDF containing confidential information like Salary details, Insurance policy details or a confidential contract etc. To mitigate such requirements, only the parties knowing a mutually trusted password should be able to see the contents.

PDFBox provides APIs to set two different passwords,

1. Owner Password If owner password is entered, when prompted, user will be granted all the Permissions including extracting, printing contents etc.

2. User Password If user password is entered, when prompted, user will be granted only those Permissions which are exclusively granted.

Refer below code which configures Access permissions using password for both Owner and User.

AccessPermission permission = new AccessPermission();
permission.setCanPrint(false);
permission.setCanExtractContent(false);

StandardProtectionPolicy policy = new StandardProtectionPolicy("ownerpdf", "userpdf", permission);
pdDoc.protect(policy);

It is mandatory to create an instance of AccessPermission and pass it to the StandardProtectionPolicy instance. For illustration purpose, above code snippet sets Print and content extraction permissions to false for user other than owner himself.

While opening the PDF, a password prompt will appear. If userpdf is entered as password, user won’t be able to print the PDF document or extract the contents. To gain access to print PDF, ownerpdf should be entered as password. Note that either of the above passwords are optional.