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How do I prevent someone from forwarding a PDF?

By Rick Borstein

Attorneys are ethically bound to rigorously defend the confidentiality of clients.

For that reason, legal professionals often want to limit the distribution of documents. Accordingly, I received the following email from at attorney this week:

Is there any way I can prevent someone from forwarding a PDF I send to them?

While it is impossible to prevent someone from forwarding a file, you can prevent the next person from opening it.

How?

Can't I use passwords?

It is easy to password protect a PDF document. (See Password Security using Adobe Acrobat 8 or 9 ).

Anyone who enters the correct password can open the document. However, that does not prevent the recipient from giving the password to another party who could, in turn, open the document.

Public Key Cryptography

Public Key security is a great way to limit who can open PDF documents. Acrobat uses a mathematical algorithm to create a related pair of keys— a secret private key and a public key.

Public Key security may also be called PKI (Public Key Infrastructure) or Certificate Security.

 

Here's how it works in practice:

1. The parties exchange public keys using Acrobat or Adobe Reader
2. You encrypt a PDF using the public key of the recipient(s)
3. The PDF can only be decrypted with the corresponding private key of your intended recipient

Read on to learn how to exchange PDF documents and prevent forwarding.

Full post as published by Acrobat for Legal Professionals on July 03, 2010 (boomark / email).