Title: PDF bruteforce tool to recover locked files
Author: Solène
Date: 09 March 2025
Tags: security
Description: In this blog post, you will learn about pdfrip, a tool
that could be used to recover the password of a locked PDF file you
forgot
# Introduction
Today, I had to open a password protected PDF (medical report),
unfortunately it is a few years old document and I did not remember the
password format (usually something based on named and birthdate -_-).
I found a nice tool that can try a lot of combinations, and it is even
better as if you know a bit the password format you can easily generate
tested patterns.
HTML pdfrip GitHub page
# Usage
The project page offers binaries for some operating systems, but you
can compile it using cargo.
The documentation on the project's README is quite clear and easy to
understand. It is possible to generate some simple patterns, try all
combinations of random characters or use a dictionary (some tools
exists to generate a dictionary).
Inside a virtual machine with 4 vCPU, I was able to achieve 36 000
checks per second, on baremetal I expect this to be a higher.