Digitally Signed and Permission Restricted PDF Files

Domingues, Patrício; Frade, Miguel

Publication

Digitally Signed and Permission Restricted PDF Files

2018-08-27Conference paper

dc.contributor.author	Domingues, Patrício
dc.contributor.author	Frade, Miguel
dc.date.accessioned	2025-06-23T17:33:10Z
dc.date.available	2025-06-23T17:33:10Z
dc.date.issued	2018-08-27
dc.description.abstract	The PDF format is the de-facto standard for many types of documents. Often a forensic digital investigation is faced with a significant volume of PDF files. It is thus important to filter PDF files, giving priority to files that have an high probability to carry important and meaningful data. In this paper, we focus on identifying potential important PDF files, selecting i) digitally signed files and ii) files that have special owner restrictions set, such as interdiction to assemble/separate pages. For this purpose, we present the python-based digiSign\|protectedPDF module for the open source Autopsy forensic software. When run over a digital forensic data source, the module creates two lists: one holding the digitally signed files and, another one with files that have special restrictions in their usage. To study the occurrence of digitally signed and of permission-protected PDF and their importance for digital forensics, we analyzed a Windows 10 forensic image, finding that 2.81% of the PDF files were digitally signed and 3.75% were permission-protected. The study shows that digitally signed PDF files can harbor meaningful data for a digital forensic investigation.	eng
dc.identifier.citation	Patricio Domingues and Miguel Frade. 2018. Digitally Signed and Per mission Restricted PDF Files: a Case Study on Digital Forensics. In ARES 2018: International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security, Au gust 27–30, 2018, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3230833.3232811
dc.identifier.doi	10.1145/3230833.3232811
dc.identifier.isbn	978-1-4503-6448-5
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10400.8/13388
dc.language.iso	eng
dc.peerreviewed	yes
dc.publisher	ACM
dc.relation	UID/EEA/50008/2013
dc.relation.hasversion	https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3230833.3232811
dc.relation.ispartof	Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
dc.rights.uri	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject	PDF files
dc.subject	Digital forensics
dc.subject	Digital signatures
dc.subject	permission-protected PDF files
dc.title	Digitally Signed and Permission Restricted PDF Files	eng
dc.type	conference paper
dspace.entity.type	Publication
oaire.citation.conferenceDate	2018-08
oaire.citation.conferencePlace	Hamburg
oaire.citation.title	ARES '18: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security
oaire.version	http://purl.org/coar/version/c_970fb48d4fbd8a85
person.familyName	Domingues
person.familyName	Frade
person.givenName	Patrício
person.givenName	Miguel
person.identifier	1234758
person.identifier.ciencia-id	AA15-6185-C477
person.identifier.ciencia-id	A512-9B28-1CEC
person.identifier.orcid	0000-0002-6207-6292
person.identifier.orcid	0000-0002-4405-7696
person.identifier.scopus-author-id	13411315400
person.identifier.scopus-author-id	24468034000
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relation.isAuthorOfPublication.latestForDiscovery	b88ada5f-0d8b-4e55-ab0a-62aa82ea1388