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Proceedings of the International Conference on Signal, Networks, Computing, and Systems pp 75–85Cite as

CheckPDF: Check What is Inside Before Signing a PDF Document

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering ((LNEE,volume 396))

Abstract

Over the years, digital document signing, particularly PDF (Portable Document Format) document, has gained increasing demand in many applications. The PDF file has a flexible logical structure; therefore, an attacker can take advantage of it to create a polymorphic PDF file which contains the actual document and another hidden object. The polymorphic PDF can be interpreted correctly by both PDF parser and image parser. As a result, when a signer signs the polymorphic PDF content by seeing the original content of the PDF file, the attacker gets the intended content signed by the signer without the signer’s knowledge. In this paper, we present a detailed illustration on how a fraudulent document be signed by a legitimate signer with different versions of PDF Reader without his/her knowledge. We provide a countermeasure by which any one can detect the presence of any objects in the PDF file while opening the file with a PDF Reader.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. DA-IICT, Gandhinagar, India

    Bhavya Bansal, Ronak Patel & Manik Lal Das

Authors
  1. Bhavya Bansal
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  2. Ronak Patel
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  3. Manik Lal Das
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Manik Lal Das .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer & Systems Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, Delhi, India

    Daya K. Lobiyal

  2. Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, National Institute of Technology , Rourkela, Odisha, India

    Durga Prasad Mohapatra

  3. Department of Computer Science, Liverpool Hope University Faculty of Science, Liverpool, United Kingdom

    Atulya Nagar

  4. National Institute of Technology, Department of Computer Science & EngineeringNational Institute of Technology, Rourkela, Odisha, India

    Manmath N. Sahoo

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© 2016 Springer India

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Cite this paper

Bansal, B., Patel, R., Das, M.L. (2016). CheckPDF: Check What is Inside Before Signing a PDF Document. In: Lobiyal, D., Mohapatra, D., Nagar, A., Sahoo, M. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Signal, Networks, Computing, and Systems. Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, vol 396. Springer, New Delhi. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3589-7_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-81-322-3589-7_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New Delhi

  • Print ISBN: 978-81-322-3587-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-81-322-3589-7

  • eBook Packages: EngineeringEngineering (R0)

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