Skip to content

decrypting-a-pdf-file-without-owner-password-on-the-command-line.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
17 lines (14 loc) · 680 Bytes

decrypting-a-pdf-file-without-owner-password-on-the-command-line.md

File metadata and controls

17 lines (14 loc) · 680 Bytes
Raw

Decrypting a PDF file without OWNER password on the command line

Briefly, a secured PDF file has two types of password: OWNER and USER.
The OWNER password is used to enforce permissions. The USER password is used to open the pdf file.

Sometimes, downloaded pdf (such as your bank statements) are secured/encrypted by default. We can decrypt this even without OWNER password using qpdf.

  1. Make sure qpdf is installed, on Debian-based systems: sudo apt-get install qpdf
  2. Run qpdf --decrypt <source pdf> <destination pdf>


You can decrypt it if it's secured with a USER password as well, but you need to know the password.