openwall / openwall/john

PDF "permissions" password? vs PDF file open password

Open
#5,645 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

enhancement
Dominant language
C
Stars
13.6k
Forks
2.6k
PR merge metrics
No merged PRs in 30d

Description

File open passwords obviously work fine. For PDFs with permission passwords, John will recognize the PDF as encrypted, and declare it has found a password, but the password field is blank. I don't see any information about permission passwords for PDF's on the forum. I may have missed it. But I was curious, if this was worthy of a feature request if it's not already present.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start by reproducing the behavior with a PDF that has a permissions password, then inspect the existing PDF encryption handling and how the password field is reported. Done means John can process permission-password PDFs without reporting a blank found password, with behavior confirmed by a focused test or reproducible sample.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
c
Domain
cryptography, security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
48/100

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.