Design and Development of PDF Document Protection System Based on DRM Technology

Portable Document Format (PDF) is used for representing two-dimensional documents independent of the application software and hardware. PDF is now a published ISO standard. This article presents the idea of implementing a plug-in for PDF based on Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. In this system, the issuer can encrypt the PDF files with its issue license awarded by authentication server. When users want to operate the encrypted files, the plug-in embedded in PDF will send an authentication request to authentication server to verify the visitor's permission and only the specified users can operate the protected PDF documents.