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I came up across pdfcrack. I am trying to crack a file sent to me, but the password sent doesn't work. Now I do not know whether it is because it is version 1.5 or whatever the password doesn't work. I used the following link to understand how pdfcrack works.

https://www.maketecheasier.com/recover-lost-pdf-passwords-linux/

Now while I could do a wordlist, first I tried using -n as shared in the manpage -

 -n, --minpw=INTEGER
              Skip trying passwords shorter than INTEGER

As can be seen it says and IIUC, it means it will skip passwords lover than the number given -

$ pdfcrack -f document.pdf -n=09
PDF version 1.5
Security Handler: Standard
V: 2
R: 3
P: -1068
Length: 128
Encrypted Metadata: True
FileID: 0
U=
O=
Average Speed: 48106.7 w/s. Current Word: 'qrbd'
^CCaught signal 2!
Trying to save state...
Successfully saved state to savedstate.sav!

Now, as the file is sensitive in nature, I have removed the FileID as well as whatever hashes were generated by the file.

Now the thing is, the current word or password it tries to hack is 'grbd' which is only 6 letters and not 9. IIUC, what I did above is have 9 letters instead of 6, what am I doing wrong?

shirish
  • 12,356

1 Answers1

3

The correct way to run this would be to skip the equal-sign, like this: pdfcrack -f document.pdf -n 9

But pdfcrack-0.20 is out now and should trickle its way to distros with time, so both might work soon. In the meantime, you can run it by skipping the equal-sign.

Henning
  • 46