Similarly, when printing to the Adobe PDF printer installed by Adobe Acrobat within Microsoft Word, the file conversion is performed by the Adobe Acrobat Distiller rendering engine. For example, using the ‘Create PDF’ Microsoft Word add-in installed by Adobe Acrobat, the PDF conversion is performed by the Adobe Acrobat rendering engine (Adobe PDF Library). In some cases, not all rendering engines were tested as not all possessed the necessary functionality.įor the purposes of testing, the application used to create the PDF documents refers to the rendering engine that did the PDF conversion.

LibreOffice Writer (Using the ‘Export As PDF’ functionality).

CutePDF (Printing to the CutePDF Writer printer).

Microsoft Word (Using ‘Save As’ PDF functionality).

Adobe Acrobat Distiller (Printing to the Adobe PDF printer).

Adobe Acrobat (Using the ‘Create PDF’ Microsoft Word add-in or native PDF authoring within Adobe Acrobat, both of which use the Adobe PDF Library).

PDF documents were generated using each of the below rendering engines: This font was installed in Ubuntu Linux so that test files could be opened in LibreOffice Writer. The Calibri font was used in Microsoft Office documents in Microsoft Windows.

CutePDF Writer 3.2 which installs Ghostscript 8.15.

Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2017 (2017.012.20093) which installs Adobe PDF Library 15 and Adobe Acrobat Distiller 17.

Unless otherwise stated, the following application versions were used: embedded text obscured by an embedded image.The current round of testing aimed to examine the same functionality previously tested but in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2017.įor the purposes of this publication, the definition of successful redaction was the complete removal of redacted data from every location in a PDF document’s file structure.Īs part of testing, a number of test cases were considered that represented some of the different ways that information could be stored within a PDF document. The redaction functionality in Adobe Acrobat Pro 10 was previously tested in 2011 to determine if any redacted information could be recovered from PDF documents. This publication provides guidance on the efficacy of redaction facilities within Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2017 and is intended for information technology and information security professionals within organisations looking to redact sensitive or personal information from PDF documents before releasing them into the public domain or to other third parties. To assist in mitigating this security risk, Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2017 provides redaction and sanitisation functionality that aims to completely remove undesirable information and other hidden information (e.g. Tag the commit with something like 'v0.0.0'.There have been numerous cases of security breaches resulting from a failure to effectively redact sensitive or private information from documents prior to release into the public domain. Releases happen automatically via Github Actions. Before you do your first contribution, we'll need a signed contributor license agreement. Please see the issues list on Github for things we need, or start a conversation if you have questions. We do our best, but there's always more to do to make it better. The PDF format is a big and complicated one, so it's difficult to do all this perfectly. If not, then we assume you can see a mix of text andĭrawings, indicating a redaction that's OK. Inspect the rectangle to see if it's all one color. You can read the source to see how it works, but the general idea is to: It has been a wonderful project to work with. Under the covers, xray uses the high-performant PyMuPDF project to parse PDFs.

If there is a bad redaction in it, you'll soon There are no configuration files or other variables to

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