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Acrobat Developer Center

Security

This page contains detailed technical information about Acrobat and Reader's security functionality. This information is intended to help developers understand how these products implement security standards, to provide basic education for developers who may have minimal experience implementing Adobe security features, and to provide guidance on best practices.

In support of these features, Acrobat and Reader provide a variety of features for integrating security products and customizing business processes. These integration points include the following: password security handler, digital ID/certificate security handler, Adobe Policy Server security handler, and APIs for digital signatures PKCS#11, MSCAPI, JavaScript, and many others.

Digital Signature User Guide for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader version 8.x (PDF, 3.1M)

Adobe (June 18, 2007)
This guide describes the digital signature features of the Adobe Acrobat 8.x family of products both for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader users as well as for security administrators.

Security Administration Guide for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader Version 8 (PDF, 2.9M)

Adobe (June 18, 2007)
This document provides guidelines for deploying and configuring Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader for use in digital signature and document security workflows.

Document Security User Guide for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader version 8.x (PDF, 2.2M)

Adobe (June 18, 2007)
This guide describes the document security features of the Adobe Acrobat 8.x family of products. It is for Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader users and administrators who may be responsible for deploying and supporting the Adobe Acrobat family of products in security workflows. This guide should be used in conjunction with the Adobe Acrobat Security Administration Guide.

Digital signatures in Acrobat (PDF, 452k)

Adobe (May 21, 2007)
This document describes Acrobat's implementation of PDF language features and explains how Acrobat does dynamic validation of digital signatures.

Digital signatures in XFA documents (PDF, 380k)

This document describes Acrobat's signature capabilities with respect to XFA documents.

FDF Data Exchange Specification (PDF, 478K)

(Feb 12, 2007)
Use Forms Data Format (FDF) files to send and share various types of data among users, system administrators, and servers.

Digital signatures in the PDF language (PDF, 351k)

(Apr 14, 2006)
This document explains the digital signature features supported by PDF, how digital signatures are represented in a PDF document, and how they solve the need for trusted documents and signatures.

Digital signature appearances (PDF, 410k )

(Oct 2006)
This document provides developer guidelines for the implementation of signature appearances in a PDF file.

Sharing Acrobat Settings and data using FDF files v8.x (PDF, 455k )

(Oct 2007) This document describes how to use FDF files to exchange data between the Acrobat family of client and server products. FDF files allow system administrators and end users to configure Acrobat installations by exporting server settings, trusted root certificates, and digital ID data to FDF files.

Sharing Acrobat settings and data using FDF files v7.x (PDF, 371k)

(Oct 26, 2006)
This document describes how to use FDF files to exchange data between the Acrobat family of client and server products. FDF files allow system administrators and end users to configure Acrobat installations by exporting server settings, trusted root certificates, and digital ID data to FDF files.

Acrobat 7.x security user guide: Digital signatures, security methods, and document security (PDF, 1.9M)

(Oct 25, 2006)
This document describes Acrobat's use of digital IDs and certificates as well as its digital signature capabilities, document security methods, secure application configuration.

Adobe Reader 7.x security user guide: Digital signatures and document security (PDF, 1.9M)

(Oct 25, 2006)
This document describes Adobe Reader's use of digital IDs and certificates as well as its digital signature validation capabilities and secure application configuration.

Adobe Acrobat Trust Manager Internet resource access control (PDF, 259k)

(Mar 20, 2006)
This document describes the new Trust Manager functionality and how system administrators can configure systems to conform to their enterprise default settings.

PDF Signature Build Dictionary Specification (PDF, 260k)

(Feb 12, 2007)
This specification describes the build properties dictionary of the signature dictionary that third-party software applications use to create signatures.

Adobe Acrobat digital signature path validation for NIST compliance test outline (updated for Acrobat 8)

(Feb 12, 2007)
Adobe Acrobat validates a digital signature in accordance with the X.509 standard and RFC 3280. This document is intended for anyone interested in evaluating Acrobat compliance with those features. The document includes test files for those interested in repeating the tests.

Acrobat 6 digital signature API reference (PDF, 1.1M)

(May 2003)
This document provides a reference for the methods, callbacks declarations, and objects used in creating digital signatures.

Redaction of confidential information in a document (PDF, 614k)

(Mar 31, 2006)
This document explains the main causes of redaction errors and gives basic guidelines for how to sanitize and convert Microsoft Word documents safely to PDFs. Detailed procedures are given for use with Word, but the general principles are useful for source documents from other word processing programs as well.

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