Protect PDF

How it works

Choose the PDF, type an opening password (the one the reader will ask for when opening it) and, if you want, an owner password and the permissions: printing, copying text, modifying, annotating, filling in forms or rearranging pages. The result is encrypted with AES-256.

The passwords stay in your browser: they are used to encrypt the file and forgotten when you finish. We do not store or send them, so we cannot recover them. If you lose the password, you lose the file: keep it in a password manager.

Ordinary PDF readers respect the permissions (printing, copying…), but a program that does not respect them could ignore them; what really protects the content is the opening password. We tell you if the password is weak, without stopping you from using it.

What is not preserved, and limits

• If you lose the opening password there is no way to recover the file. We do not have it.
• The permissions are a request to the PDF reader: they do not stop a program that ignores them from copying or printing. The real protection is the opening password.
• If you leave the owner password empty, the opening password is used: anyone who opens the file with it can also change the permissions.
• A digital signature stops validating, because the file is written out again in full.
• A PDF that already had a password can be protected again too: the site asks for the old one and the new one replaces it.
• Very large files (over roughly 100-150 MB in total, or with thousands of pages) may fail, especially on phones, because everything happens in your device's memory.