Taking the password off a PDF
This tool removes a password you know from a document you are entitled to use, so that the document can be worked on. It is the first step for almost everything else on this site, because a locked PDF cannot be merged, split, signed or compressed until it is open. What it is not is a way into a document whose password you do not have.
Which tool you need
A PDF you have the password for, that you need to work on
Unlock PDF. You get a new copy with no password on it, and before the download appears that copy is opened here and confirmed to need none.
A PDF whose password you do not know
Nothing here will open it, and nothing here tries. A password you cannot supply leaves the document as unreadable to this site as to any other reader. Ask whoever sent it.
Changing a document's password
Unlock it here first, then set the new one with Password protect PDF. A document that already has a password is refused there rather than locked twice.
A document protected with a certificate rather than a password
Not supported. This handles the password-based protection that a reader prompts you for; certificate protection is a different mechanism and needs the software that issued it.
Restrictions you want back afterwards
Password protect PDF can set a new password and a fresh set of permissions on the unlocked copy, which is the only way to get them back once they are gone.
The restrictions leave with the password
Printing and copying restrictions are removed along with the password, and not as a convenience: the PDF format stores them inside the encryption rather than beside it, so there is no way to take one off and leave the other on.
That is usually what you wanted. Where it is not — a document you unlock to edit and then need to pass on with the same limits — set them again on the unlocked copy with Password protect.
What it can break
Taking the encryption off means rewriting every stream in the document, and a signature that covered the original bytes does not survive being rewritten. So a signed or certified PDF may stop validating once it is unlocked, and there is no way round that while also removing the protection.
So check any signed, certified, tagged or archival PDF in the reader your recipient uses before relying on the unlocked copy — and keep the protected original, which is untouched, in case the signature was the point.
Which kinds of protection it handles
Every revision of the password-based scheme still in use: AES-256, AES-128 and the RC4 ones that came before them, including files whose objects are packed away into compressed streams. Between them that is essentially every locked PDF a person is sent.
What to know before you start
- The password is required. This removes protection from a document you are authorized to use; it does not defeat protection.
- Certificate-protected PDFs are outside what this handles.
- The document is decrypted in your browser and the unlocked copy saved on this device. Neither the file nor the password goes anywhere, because there is no server involved in the work.