Convenience vs Security

When it comes to life in general, convenience and security are almost always on the opposite ends of the same spectrum.

For example, if you wanted your home to be highly secure, you could add a third or fourth lock to all the doors; this would undoubtedly increase security, but it would be very inconvenient to enter the house.

The same quandary presents itself when we are dealing with technology systems. A short and easy password, such as "1234", is convenient; however, it is also very easy to guess. We are therefore advised to use long and complex passwords as well as multi-factor authentication. We trade convenience for security because, in this case, it is worth it.

When it comes to securing intellectual property in our PDF documents, two options come to mind. 

More convenience, less security.

The first option is to protect the document using PDF permissions and an Owner password. With these permissions, you can limit the PDF file from being printed, edited, having contents copied, and a few other options. You can also add PDF expiry by adding PDF JavaScript into the mix.

 As you would expect, it is very convenient to view PDF files that have been protected with this method because any PDF viewer can open them. The downside to PDF permissions is that it is wholly dependent on the PDF reader whether it will obey the permissions or not. If a user were to use a non-compliant reader, it would automatically bypass all the security you have placed on the document. Users can also take screencaps of the PDF reader to capture the document’s contents.

Adobe Acrobat's warning regarding permissions and third-party products

More security, less convenience.

The second option for securing PDF documents is to use Digital Right Management (DRM) technology such as All-About-PDF's PDFe files. In this scenario, the document is wrapped in an encrypted security layer that can hold a virtually unlimited number of permissions and can introduce features such as expiry dates, printing limitations, sharing limitations, screen capture blocking, and so much more. To guarantee the security of the intellectual property, DRM-protected PDF files can however only be viewed using proprietary readers.

As a user, it is then up to you to examine what you are trying to protect, its value and determine which side of the spectrum you will be on. Are you going to lean towards providing more convenience to your users while sacrificing the security of your intellectual property? Or are you going to introduce some inconvenience to consuming your content while ensuring that it is secure and protected?

Best of Both Worlds?

Fortunately, we at All-About-PDF like a good challenge and have been wrestling with this very issue. We have come up with a few options to reduce the inconvenience caused by using proprietary DRM technology without sacrificing any of the security benefits. These include:

• Our PDFe Reader (used to read DRM protected PDF files) is free for everyone to download

• Our PDFe Reader is available on all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, iOS, iPad, Android, and the Web.

• With the ability to "DRM and Share" in our apps, you can protect your PDF file with our leading-edge DRM technology and share the resulting URL that the user can open in any web browser on any device.

With All-About-PDF’s DRM protection, we are continuously striving to strike a balance between excellent security for your intellectual property and convenience for your end users. Get started today by downloading our free 14-day trial.

How To Set a PDF To Expire Days After Being Opened

As useful as setting an expiry date on a PDF is, sometimes you just don’t know if the person you are sending the PDF to will have a chance to review the document in time. This is especially true for course materials where it is useful to protect the documents with an expiry date but the actual courses may have multiple student intakes with varying starting dates. It can be useful to set the PDF to expire so many days after the student opens the course material; the course duration for example.

In All-About-PDF, you can set a PDF’s expiry date to be relative to when the document is first opened. This is achieved using our ground-breaking digital rights management (DRM) technology.

Let’s look at an example of how to set a PDF file to expire 365 days after being opened. Follow the steps below:

1. Download and open All-About-PDF

2. Click on the SET EXPIRY button

3. Click the “…” button and select the PDF file you would like to process

4. Select the Use All-About-PDF DRM option

5. Select the Expire X days after first viewing and set the number of days to 365

6. Check the box for Use internet time… so that the document expiry cannot be bypassed by changing the user’s system date

7. Provide a custom message for when the PDF expires.

8. Hit the GO button and apply the settings to the PDF. The document will be saved with a PDFE extension in the same folder as the original file.

To get started with protecting your PDF documents with a relative expiry date, download All-About-PDF today.

DRM Protected PDFe Files

What is Digital Rights Management (DRM) Protection

Digital Rights Management is a far-reaching term that refers to any scheme that controls access to copyrighted material using technological means. In essence, DRM removes usage control from the person in possession of digital content and puts it in the hands of the copyright owner.

What are PDFe Files?

All-About-PDF’s PDFe files are encrypted PDF documents that have an expiry date. They allow the document author to specify when the PDF document is no longer valid. In the near future, these documents will include more features such as geolocation lock (where a document can only be viewed in specific regions), domain lock (the document can only be viewed by users of a specific Windows domains) and remote kill-switch ability (the document author can remote render the document invalid).

These features are very useful for authors of valuable intellectual property such as online course materials, engineering designs, architecture drawings etc. This allows the authors to share their copyrighted material while maintaining full access control to their intellectual property.

In order to maintain high security, the PDFe file specification is proprietary to All-About-PDF and can only be opened by our special document readers.

How To Open AND VIEW PDFE Files

iOS and iPadOS PDFe Viewer

Once a PDFe file has been created in All-About-PDF, there are three ways of opening and viewing it.

1. Using the free PDFe Viewer for Windows: you can be download this from our downloads page

2. Using the free PDFe Viewer for macOS: you can download this from our downloads page

3. Using the free iOS and iPad app: this can be downloaded from the Apple Apple Store

4. Using our free online PDFe viewer: you may access the online PDFe Viewer using Chrome web browser at this address.

All of the above methods of viewing PDFe documents do not allow saving or printing of the original PDF document.

How To Prevent a PDF From Being Edited

PDF documents are by far the best way to share all kinds of documents all over the internet. A very common use for PDF documents is to upload your resumè and cover letters to job sites. Another use to create document templates that can be sold online.

What makes PDFs so useful for sharing is that they can be opened on virtually any operating system using a variety of free and paid software. With PDF, you can be assured that the document will look exactly the way you intended it to look regardless of the software used to open it.

There are however some instances where you don't your shared document to be modified by any viewer. For example, if you send a resumè to a recruiter, you want to be sure that your details are not modified without your consent. When you create a document online for monetization, you don't other people to easily download and use it without paying you for your hard-work.

What can you do to make PDF not editable?

The answer is to set PDF permissions on the PDF document before you share it.

A PDF document can contain 2 passwords; a User password and an Owner password. By adding an Owner password, you can specify what the viewer can and cannot do with your PDF document. When a PDF only has an Owner password, it can still be opened and viewed without a password prompt. The permissions that you can set on a PDF include:

• allow/disallow printing

• allow/disallow copying of contents

• allow/disallow editing/modifying of contents

• allow/disallow editing/modifying of annotations

• allow/disallow form filling

• allow/disallow screen readers

With All-About-PDF, setting permissions on your PDF files is straight forward:

1. Open All-About-PDF and click on the "Protect" button

2. In the Window that opens, select the PDF file that you would like to set permissions on

3. Leave the User password blank (unless you want to restrict opening of the document with a password)

4. Set the Owner password to a strong password

5. Select the permissions that you would like to set on the document

6. Hit the "GO" button to set the permissions.

7. The protected PDF will be saved in the same folder as the original document with "protected" added to the file name.

Whenever the document is opened, the viewer will be restricted to just the permissions you set. Get started by downloading All-About-PDF now.

For further document protection, you can also use All-About-PDF to add image or text watermark to the PDF file.