PDF Security

Protect and Secure

Keep your data safe

Ensuring that your data is secure and protected is important.

Although sharing PDF documents is easy, there are also simple ways to keep the data inside safe. Using passwords to share information with authorized users or editors, redaction to remove sensitive information to remain compliant with necessary regulations, digital signatures to make binding agreements simple and secure and more.

iText offers many ways to customize the security features on your documents - many of which are built into our open-source iText Core offering.

Interested in learning more about how to secure PDF documents? Watch our recorded webinar below.

Free Trial Watch PDF Security: Encryption and Digital Signatures webinar

Security options

How iText can help

There are some great, simple ways to protect and secure your data with iText. Choose one for simple security, or a combination to meet your needs.

We offer PDF Protector, a FREE online tool to evaluate how iText can help add protection to your workflow.

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Passwords

Password protection allows you to share authorization for a document with people you trust. The document will be encrypted, and then can be decrypted with the correct password.

Encryption

Encryption “encodes” the data in your document, so that any unauthorized users that open it will not be able to read the document without “decoding” it-usually through a Public/Private key pair or password.

Digital Signatures

Digital signatures combine a few levels of security using both a public key and a hash to identify that this is the correct document, and that it has not been altered. Learn more about Digital Signatures on our solutions page.

Redaction with pdfSweep

Remove sensitive information from a document, while still keeping the public information available for archives. This is often used for personal identification numbers, names, dates and information such as health or financial details. Our pdfSweep add-on for iText Core allows you to remove these types of information from documents to remain compliant with regulations such as GDPR or CCPA without removing all of your archives.

Adding a password to a PDF with iText Core

Below is a quick example where you can see the code to add a password to an existing PDF.

Click Upload File and make sure the file name of the PDF you upload matches the name you specify in private static final String ORIG. You can then choose the type of password you want to set by specifying it in private static final byte[] USERPASS or private static final byte[] OWNERPASS. You can set both types of password if you wish.

Then click Execute to run your code. To remove an uploaded file, click the x displayed next to the file name.

import com.itextpdf.kernel.pdf.EncryptionConstants; import com.itextpdf.kernel.pdf.PdfDocument; import com.itextpdf.kernel.pdf.PdfReader; import com.itextpdf.kernel.pdf.PdfWriter; import com.itextpdf.kernel.pdf.WriterProperties; import java.io.FileOutputStream; import java.io.IOException; public class PDFProtection { private static final String ORIG = "/uploads/protect.pdf"; private static final String OUTPUT_FOLDER = "/myfiles/"; private static final byte[] USERPASS = "user".getBytes(); private static final byte[] OWNERPASS = "owner".getBytes(); public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException { PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(ORIG); WriterProperties writerProperties = new WriterProperties(); writerProperties.setStandardEncryption(USERPASS, OWNERPASS, EncryptionConstants.ALLOW_PRINTING, EncryptionConstants.ENCRYPTION_AES_128); PdfWriter pdfWriter = new PdfWriter(new FileOutputStream(OUTPUT_FOLDER + "Protected.pdf"), writerProperties); PdfDocument pdfDocument = new PdfDocument(pdfReader, pdfWriter); pdfDocument.close(); } }

using System.IO; using iText.Kernel.Pdf; namespace PDFProtection { public class PDFProtection { private static string ORIG = "/uploads/protect.pdf"; private static string OUTPUT_FOLDER = "/myfiles/"; private static byte[] USERPASS = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes("user"); private static byte[] OWNERPASS = System.Text.Encoding.Default.GetBytes("owner"); public static void Main(string[] args) { PdfReader pdfReader = new PdfReader(ORIG); WriterProperties writerProperties = new WriterProperties(); writerProperties.SetStandardEncryption(USERPASS, OWNERPASS, EncryptionConstants.ALLOW_PRINTING, EncryptionConstants.ENCRYPTION_AES_128); PdfWriter pdfWriter = new PdfWriter(new FileStream(OUTPUT_FOLDER + "Protected.pdf", FileMode.Create), writerProperties); PdfDocument pdfDocument = new PdfDocument(pdfReader, pdfWriter); pdfDocument.Close(); } } }

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All of the PDF Security options are available in our Free Trial, with examples available to get you started.

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Using PDF Security for Compliance

Digital documents improve efficiency for nearly every industry; archiving in searchable PDFs, automating workflows, using templates to automatically create documents from forms, saving information from PDF into your database and more. But with our digital workflows, we need to ensure that we are remaining compliant with many types of regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA. To do this, built-in security features in PDF make it easy to set up the right level of security to meet your needs. Most of the security features are built into iText Core, and can be implemented without any additional investment. You can read about how we can help with compliance on the GDPR and CCPA pages. If you want to know how iText can help with other compliance issues, just ask! Contact us with your questions and we'll be happy to answer them.

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