Package: poppler
Version: 0.26.5-2
Severity: important
Banks and other organizations are finally starting to send email
statements instead of asking people to log in to web sites and download
them. E.g. Barclaycard now offers to send statements as email
attachment, using PDF encryption.
Unfortunately, most of the PDF readers in Debian don't work with these PDFs
Even worse, they display messages stating that the password is invalid
rather than explaining that they don't support the encryption method.
On a jessie system:
$ pdfinfo -upw $PASS statement.pdf
Syntax Error: Invalid encryption key length
Command Line Error: Incorrect password
The feedback in the evince and okular GUIs also claims the password was
wrong.
On a wheezy system, evince, xpdf and okular all fail too, slightly
different console output:
$ evince statement.pdf
Error: Weird encryption info
Error: Incorrect password
$ xpdf statement.pdf
Error: Weird encryption info
Error: Incorrect password
$ pdfinfo -upw $PASS statement.pdf
Error: Weird encryption info
Error: Incorrect password
I was able to inspect the PDF with the qpdf utility on jessie:
$ qpdf --password=$PASS --show-encryption statement.pdf
R = 6
P = -1084
User password = (hidden)
extract for accessibility: allowed
extract for any purpose: not allowed
print low resolution: allowed
print high resolution: allowed
modify document assembly: not allowed
modify forms: allowed
modify annotations: not allowed
modify other: not allowed
modify anything: not allowed
stream encryption method: AESv3
string encryption method: AESv3
file encryption method: AESv3
and as a workaround, qpdf can also convert it to a regular PDF that
other tools can read:
qpdf --password=$PASS --decrypt statement.pdf out.pdf
but on wheezy qpdf fails too:
$ qpdf --password=$PASS --show-encryption statement.pdf
statement.pdf (encryption dictionary, file position 741263): Unsupported
/R or /V in encryption dictionary
Even if this can't be fixed/implemented fully for jessie, it would be
very useful to improve the error messages so that people see different
errors in the GUI when an unsupported encryption format is encountered
and not just keep telling them they may have tried the wrong password.
--
To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected]
with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
