password protection for docs/pdfs

esperanza

I've tried downloading the trial version of the adobe acrobat 8 professional tryout and it hasn't worked.

http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobatpro/tryout.html

perhaps it's because I've downloaded it before?? I need to protect pdf documents (invoices) with a password for access. Is there another software that can do this for me? (Word is not secure enough).

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Surely if you protect the medium on which they are stored, it would be safer.

I'm no expert on cryptography, but to me password protecting a document is a waste of time. Everyone will have access to the file itself,and give an experienced cracker long enough and he will crack it. Especially since he will have permanent access to the file by just taking a copy of it.

However if you protect the medium,no one will have access to the actual files at all so there is a much lesser chance of security being compromised.

i.e. Folders requiring specific permissions on a central server

jor el

Adobe password protection is easily cracked. A simple alternative is to send the invoice to the recipient in a password protected zip/rar file. Then simply agree on a password over the phone or in a seperate email.

Capt'n Midnight

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ it's a printer driver that creates a PDF instead of sending a signal to a printer
you can change the options so it puts a password on the PDF's

It's free

If you want you can open the PDF again and use acrobat reader to print it a second time using the "print as image" option to get a file 10 times bigger but slightly harder to extract info from.

office 2003 and later mean most business computers have had the facility to OCR any printable document.

esperanza

Well, the people I'm dealing with, afaik, are not that internet savvy. I've been protecting word documents instead of pdfs with a password as I can't install the trial version of adobe professionnal. Is protecting a pdf with a password more secure?

Thanks for the sourceforge link, captain midnight.

Capt'n Midnight

If you want to edit the document PDF is not the way to go.

If you want a read only document PDF is fairly standard and unlike most image formats you can set the page size to A4.

If you want image formats PDFcreator also does JPG, TIF and PNG

mathew

How are you creating the pdfs at the moment? Or are you planning to do that with Acrobat Pro?

Also. Whats your plan for when the trial version runs out?

esperanza

So, are passwords (even those 14 characters in length containing numbers and letters) still not safe enough to protect Word documents?