Hi all,

The following few lines are some thoughts about encryption in PDF.
The PDF spec for reference is vers. 1.4.
The encryption  is described in detail in section 3.4 of spec.
Not all the PDF file is encrypted: strings and streams composing the
document are encrypted, the rest of the file () is in clear (not
encrypted).

The objects must be encrypted after the filters are applied, and
decrypted before the filters are applied.

The encryption catalog defines the 'security handler' used to perform
the encryption task.

The spec defines a Standard security handler that is a build-in handler.

The standard security handler uses the MD5 message-digest algorithm to
form the encryption key and the RC4 algorithm to encrypt the data.
It uses what is called in spec algorithm 3.2 to compute the encryption
key and algorithm 3.1 to encrypt/decrypt data.

The building blocks needed to implement standard handler encryption
are already there in OOo source tree ( sal/rlt ):

- rtl_digest_MD5 to compute the encryption key;
- rtl_cipher_ARCFOUR to crypt the string or stream.

Of course there are a lot of implementation details I still haven't
worked out, but these lines are only a start, so any comment, addition
to these will be appreciated.

Thanks.
--
Regards,
beppec56

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