| 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. | |
| 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. |