⚠️ This project is no longer maintained and has been archived.
A Password Recovery Tool for PDF-files, originally forked from pdfcrack.sourceforge.net (v0.19).
PDFCrack served its purpose, but the landscape has moved on:
- Recover user/owner passwords from PDFs using the Standard Security Handler
- Supports revision 2, 3, 4, and 5 (RC4-40, RC4-128, SHA-256)
- Wordlist and brute-force attacks
- Save/resume cracking jobs
- ❌ No revision 6 (AES-256 / PDF 2.0) support — all modern PDFs since ~2017 use R6
- ❌ Single-threaded only — no multi-core or GPU acceleration
- ❌ Cannot decrypt document content — only recovers passwords, won't decrypt AES-encrypted streams
- ❌ Primitive PDF parser — fragile, doesn't handle linearized/streaming PDFs
- ❌ No mask attacks, no real permutation engine, no distributed cracking
- ❌ Stalled since 2020 — upstream is also unmaintained
| Tool | Language | Stars | Why it's better |
|---|---|---|---|
| pdfrip | Rust | 1.4k+ | Multi-threaded, R6 support, mask/date/number attacks, checkpoint/resume, actively maintained |
| hashcat | C | 34k+ | GPU-accelerated, industry standard, supports PDF modes 10400–10700 |
| John the Ripper | C | 10k+ | GPU support via OpenCL, broad format support |
- qpdf (C++) — battle-tested PDF transformation library
qpdf --password=XXXX --decrypt input.pdf output.pdf
This fork added Windows support to the original pdfcrack 0.19 codebase. The original tool was written by Henning Norén (2006–2020) as one of the first open-source PDF password recovery tools. It was small, dependency-free, and served the community well for over a decade.
The repository is kept in archived (read-only) state for historical reference.
Archived: June 2026