(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 97

Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

Hybrid Portable Document Format Protection

Scheme based on Public key and Digital
Watermarking
Karim Shamekh1, Ashraf Darwish2 and Mohamed Kouta3
1
Computer Science Department, High Technology Institute, 10th of Ramadan, Egypt,
Karim_Shamekh@hotmail.com
2
Computer Science Department, Faculty of Science, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt
amodarwish@yahoo.com
3
Arab Academy for Science, Technology and Maritime, Cairo, Egypt
mmkouta@hotmail.com

Abstract: Portable Document Format (PDF) developed by
Adobe Systems Inc. is a flexible and popular document
distribution and delivery file format, and it is supported within
various operating systems and devices. The ease of reproduction,
distribution, and manipulation of digital documents creates
problems for authorized parties that wish to prevent illegal use
of such documents. To this end, digital watermarking has been
proposed as a last line of defence to protect PDF files copyright
through visible watermarks in such files. As well as, to preserve
the integrity of the digital watermark, an asymmetric
cryptographic algorithm (DES) is employed. The proposed
watermarking method does not change the values of the stored
data objects. Experimental results show the feasibility of the
proposed method and provide a detailed security analysis and
performance evaluation to show that the digital watermarking is
robust and can withstand various types of attacks.
Keywords: Portable Document Format (PDF), Watermarking
(WM), Data Encryption Standard (DES), Copyright protection,
Cryptosystems.
1. Introduction
The number of files that are published and exchanged
through the Internet is constantly growing and electronic
document exchange is becoming more and more popular
among Internet users. The diversity of platforms, formats
and applications has called for a common technology to
overcome those differences and produce universally readable
documents to be exchanged without limitations. Even
though it is supported by nearly every application on any
machine, plain text ASCII has failed to become popular
because it does not allow text formatting, image embedding
and other features that are required to an efficient
communication. Portable Document Format (PDF) files [1]
are popular nowadays, and so using them as carriers of
secret messages for covert communication is convenient.
Though there are some techniques of embedding data in text
files [2-4], studies of using PDF files as cover media are
very few, except Zhong et al. [5] in which integer numerals
specifying the positions of the text characters in a PDF file
are used to embed secret data. In this paper a new algorithm
for PDF documents protection has been presented.
The PDF, created by Adobe Systems for document exchange
[1], is a fixed-layout format for representing documents in a
manner independent of the application software, hardware,
and operating system. Each PDF file contains a complete
description of a 2-D document, which includes text, fonts,
images, and vector graphics described by a context-free
grammar modified from PostScript. Many PDF readers are
available for use to read PDF files; each PDF file appears in
the window of a PDF reader as an image-like document.
The main advantage of the PDF format is that it allows
documents created within any desktop publishing package to
be viewed in the original typeset design, regardless of the
systems where it is being displayed. Documents with texts,
images, hyper-links and other desirable features in
document authoring, can be easily created with the packages
distributed by Adobe or with any other authoring application
(e.g., Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, LaTeX, etc.) and then
converted to the PDF format. The result is an easy to
distribute, small size document, that will be displayed
exactly in the way it was created, on any platform and using
any viewer application.
Besides being very flexible and portable, PDF documents are
also considered to be secure. Popular document formats like
Microsoft Compound Document File Format (MCDFF) have
been proven to have security flaws that can leak private user
information(see Castiglione et al.(2007)[6]), while PDF
documents are widely regarded as immune to such
problems. This is one of the reasons why many
governmental and educational institutions have chosen PDF
as their official document standard. In this paper, we will
start giving a concise overview of the PDF format, focusing
on how data is stored and managed.
Digital watermarking is a relatively new research area that
attracted the interest of numerous researchers both in the
academia and the industry and became one of the hottest
research topics in the multimedia signal processing
community. Although the term watermarking has slightly
different meanings in the literature, one definition that
seems to prevail is the following [7]: Watermarking is the
practice of imperceptibly altering a piece of data in order to
embed information about the data. The above definition
reveals two important characteristics of watermarking. First,
information embedding should not cause perceptible
changes to the host medium (sometimes called cover
medium or cover data). Second, the message should be
related to the host medium. In this sense, the watermarking
techniques form a subset of information hiding techniques.
However, certain authors use the term watermarking with a
98
meaning equivalent to that of information hiding in the
general sense.
Digital media are replacing traditional analog media and
will continue to do so. By digital media, we mean digital
representations of audio, text documents, images, video,
three-dimensional scenes, etc. These media offer many
benefits over their analog predecessors (e.g., audio and
video cassettes). Unlike analog media, digital media can be
stored, duplicated, and distributed with no loss of fidelity.
Digital media can also be manipulated and modified easily.
Clearly, digital media offer many benefits, but they also
create problems for parties who wish to prevent illegal
reproduction and distribution of valuable digital media (e.g.,
copyrighted, commercial, privileged, sensitive, and/or secret
documents).Two classic methods for protecting documents
are encryption and copy protection. However, once
decrypted, a document can be copied and distributed easily,
and copy-protection mechanisms can often be bypassed. As
a safeguard against failures of encryption and copy
protection, digital watermarking has been proposed as a last
line of defence against unauthorized distribution of valuable
digital media.
This paper provides insight for some of the security issues
within the use of digital watermarking and its integrity with
cryptographic algorithm (DES).
The remainder of this paper is as follows. Section 2 surveys
related works while Section 3 analyzes the portable
document files (PDF) format. Section 4 reviews the digital
watermarking and cryptographic systems. Section 5
introduces the proposed scheme, experimental results and
analysis. Conclusion and future work are given in section 6.
1.1Copyright Protection
The main requirements for copyright-protection
watermarking algorithms are robustness (denoting how the
watermark can survive any kind of malicious or
unintentional transformations), visibility (does the
watermark introduce perceptible artifacts), and capacity (the
amount of information which can be reliably hidden and
extracted from the document). For copyright applications,
robustness should be as high as possible, and visibility as
low as possible in order to preserve the value of the marked
document. Note, however, that capacity can be low since
copyright information generally requires a rather small
amount of information, which can be an index inside a
database holding copyright information. Other requirements
can be outlined, which are: security (from the cryptographic
point of view), and that the scheme should be oblivious (the
original or cover image is not needed for the extraction
process). Many robust watermarking schemes have been
proposed, consisting in either spatial domain or transform
domain watermarks. The main issue addressed for these
schemes these last years is the robustness of watermarks
against various intentional or unintentional alterations,
degradations, geometrical distortions or media-conversion
which can be applied to the watermarked image. The four
main issues of the state-of-the-art watermark robustness are
described in more details in [8, 9].
(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010
2. Related Work
Information about the Portable Document Format can be
found in [10]. Those documents are the main source of
information on how PDF documents are structured and
managed by various PDF compliant applications.
Even though information leakage in published documents is
a well known issue, only a few publications investigate the
problem. Byers (Byers, 2004 [11]) showed how hidden text
can be extracted from
MicrosoftWorddocuments.Hecollectedover100,000
documents and compared the text that appears when each
document is opened with Microsoft Word, with the text
extracted from the same documents using widely known text
extraction tools Almost each processed document had some
hidden contents like previously deleted texts, revisions, etc.
Castiglione et al.(2007)[6] conducted a more extensive study
on the popular document format, investigating the way
Microsoft Compound documents are created and structured.
The same authors developed some tools to extract document
hidden meta data as well as sensitive publisher information
and show how to use the slack space responsible of such
threat as a steganographic means.
Several companies and institutions have distributed
guidelines to avoid information leakage in published
documents after that the media reported news about
documents published on the Web containing sensitive
information which were not supposed to become public. For
example, in May 2005 the Coalition Provisional Authority
in Iraq published a PDF document on the “Sgrena-Calipari
Incident”. Black boxes were used to conceal the names of
some people involved in the incident, but all of them were
easily revealed copying the text from the original document
into a text editor [12]. Several papers discuss the PDF
structure [13, 14] and some of them introduce tools for
content extraction from PDF documents [15] or tools to use
PDF documents as a steganographic means [16].
3. The Portable Document Format (PDF)
This section will give a brief over view of the PDF format,
highlighting the parts that are relevant to our work. The
Portable Document Format is based on the PostScript
(Adobe Systems Inc., 1999) page description language and
has been introduced to improve performances and provide
some form of user interactivity. A PDF document consists of
a collection of objects which together describe the
appearance of the document pages. Objects and structural
information are all encoded in a single, self contained,
sequence of bytes.
The structure of a PDF file has four main components:
• A header identifying the version of the PDF
specification to which the file complies. The file
header contains a five character magic number,
‘‘%PDF-’’, and a version number in the form 1.x
where x is a digit between 0 and 7, as shown in
Table 1.
• One or more body sections containing the objects
that constitute the document as it appears to the
user;
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 99
• One or more cross-reference tables storing
information and pointers to objects stored in the
file;
• One or more trailers that provide the location of
the cross-reference tables in the file.
Table 1: PDF file header For version 1.7 document
Header Version
%PDF- 1.7
A newly created PDF document has only one body section,
one cross-reference table and one trailer. When a document
is modified, its previous version is not updated, but any
changes and new contents are appended to the end of file,
adding a new body section, a new section of the cross-
reference table and a new trailer. The incremental update
avoids rewriting the whole file, resulting in a faster saving
process, especially when only small amendments are made
to very large files. Objects stored in the body section have an
object number used to unambiguously identify the object
within the file, anon-zero generation number and a list of
key-value pairs enclosed between the keywords (obj) and
endobj. Generation numbers are used only when object
numbers are reused, that is, when the object number
previously assigned to an object that has been deleted is
assigned to a new one. Due to incremental updates,
whenever an object is modified, a copy of the object with the
latest changes is stored in the file. The newly created copy
will have the same object number as the previous one. Thus,
several copies of an object can be stored in the file, each one
reflecting the modifications made to that object from the
time it was created, onwards.
The cross-reference table is composed of several sections
and allows random access to file objects. When a document
is created, the cross-reference table has only one section and
new sections are added every time the file is updated. Each
section contains one entry per object, for a contiguous
number of objects.
Table 2: An example of cross-reference table
xref
0 36
0000000000 65535 f
0000076327 00000 n
0000076478 00000 n
0000076624 00000 n
0000078478 00000 n
0000078629 00000 n
0000078775 00000 n
0000078488 00000 n
0000078639 00000 n
. detectable by unauthorized parties.
. • No reference to original document
. For some applications, it is necessary to recover the
0000100661 00000 n
An example of cross-reference table section is given in
Table 2.As shown, each section starts with the keyword
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010
(xref) followed by the object number of the first object that
has an entry in that section and the number of its entries.
Table 2 shows a section with entries of 36 objects, from
object 0 to object 35. Each entry provides the following
information:
• The object offset in the file;
• The object generation number;
• The free/in-use flag with value n if the object is in use or ƒ
if the object is free, that is, if the object has been deleted.
Object 0 is a special object and it is always marked as free,
with generation number 65535. The latest document
(trailer) is stored at the end of the file and points to the last
section of the cross-reference table. A PDF document is
always read from the end (apart when generated with the
“Fast Web View ”flag enabled),looking for the offset
relative to the last section of the cross-reference table,
required to identify the objects that constitute the latest
version of the document. Each time the document is
updated–adding new objects or modifying existing ones–a
new body, cross-reference table section and trailer are
appended to the file. The body section will contain the
newly created objects or the updated version of the existing
ones, the cross-reference table section will store information
to retrieve those objects, while the trailer will have a
reference to the newly created cross-reference table section,
as well as a pointer to the previous one.
4. Digital Watermarking and Cryptosystems:
basics and overview
4.1 Digital watermarking
Digital watermarking requires elements from many
disciplines, including signal processing,
telecommunications, cryptography, psychophysics, and law.
In this paper, we focus on the process of protecting PDF
documents.
An effective watermark should have several properties,
listed below, whose importance will vary depending upon
the application.
• Robustness
The watermark should be reliably detectable after alterations
to the marked document. Robustness means that it must be
difficult (ideally impossible) to defeat a watermark without
degrading the marked document severely-so severely that
the document is no longer useful or has no (commercial)
value.
• Imperceptibility or a low degree of obtrusiveness
To preserve the quality of the marked document, the
watermark should not noticeably distort the original
document. Ideally, the original and marked documents
should be perceptually identical.
• Security
Unauthorized parties should not be able to read or alter the
watermark. Ideally, the watermark should not even be
watermark without requiring the original, unmarked
document (which would otherwise be stored in a secure
archive).
100
• Unambiguity
A watermark must convey unambiguous information about
the rightful owner of a copyright, point of distribution, etc.
Of these properties, robustness, imperceptibility, and
security are usually the most important. When speaking of
robustness, we often talk about attacks on a watermark. An
attack is an operation on the marked document that,
intentionally or not, may degrade the watermark and make
the watermark harder to detect. For text documents, an
attack might consist of photocopying.
4.2. Visible watermarking
Visible watermarking techniques are used to protect the
copyright of digital multimedia (audio, image or video) that
have to be delivered for certain purposes, such as digital
multimedia used in exhibition, digital library, advertisement
or distant learning web, while illegal duplication is
forbidden. Braudaway et al. [17] proposed one of the early
approaches for visible watermarking by formulating the
nonlinear equation to accomplish the luminance alteration
in spatial domain. In this scheme, dimensions of the
watermark image are equal to those of the host image. There
is a one-to-one correspondence between pixel locations in
the watermark image and those in the host image.
According to their brightness, pixels in the watermark
image can be divided into transparent and non-transparent
categories. The brightness of each pixel in the host image in
proportion to the non-transparent regions of the watermark
will be increased or reduced to a perceptually equal amount
by using a nonlinear equation while the brightness of each
pixel in proportion to the transparent regions of the
watermark will remain the same after watermark
embedding.
Meng and Chang [18] applied the stochastic approximation
for Braudaway’s method in the discrete cosine transform
(DCT) domain by adding visible watermarks in the video
sequences. Mohanty et al. [19] proposed a watermarking
technique called dual watermarking which combines a
visible watermark and an invisible watermark in the spatial
domain. The visible watermark is adopted to establish the
owner’s right to the image and invisible watermark is
utilized to check the intentional and unintentional
tampering of the image. Chen [20] has proposed a visible
watermarking mechanism to embed a gray level watermark
into the host image based on a statistic approach. First, the
host image is divided into equal blocks and the standard
deviation in each block is calculated.
The standard deviation value will determine the amount of
gray value of the pixel in the watermark to be embedded
into the corresponding host image. Kankanhalli et al. [21]
proposed a visible watermarking algorithm in the discrete
cosine transform (DCT) domain. First, the host image and
the watermark image are divided into 8 x8 blocks.
Next, they classify each block into one of eight classes
depending on the sensitivity of the block to distortion and
adopt the effect of luminance to make a final correction on
the block scaling factors.
The strength of the watermark is added in varying
proportions depending on the class to which the image block
belongs. Mohanty et al. [22] proposed a modification
(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010
scheme on their watermark insertion technique of [23] in
order to make the watermark more robust.
Hu and Kwong [24, 25] implemented an adaptive visible
watermarking in the wavelet domain by using the truncated
Gaussian function to approximate the effect of luminance
masking for the image fusion. Based on image features, they
first classify the host and watermark image pixels into
different perceptual classes.
Then, they use the classification information to guide the
pixelwise watermark embedding. In high-pass subbands,
they focus on image features, while in the low-pass subband,
they use truncated Gaussian function to approximate the
effect of luminance masking. Yong et al. [26] also proposed
a translucent digital watermark in the DWT domain and
used the error-correct code to improve the ability of anti-
attacks.
Each of the above schemes wasn’t devoted to better feature
based classification and the use of sophisticated visual
masking models, so Huang and Tang [27] presented a
contrast sensitive visible watermarking scheme with the
assistance of HVS. They first compute the CSF mask of the
discrete wavelet transform domain.
Secondly, they use a square function to determine the mask
weights for each subband. Thirdly, they adjust the scaling
and embedding factors based on the block classification with
the texture sensitivity of the HVS. However, their scheme
should further consider the following issues:
• The basis function of the wavelet transform plays an
important role during the application of CSF for
the HVS in the wavelet transform domain, but the
study [27] didn’t consider this key factor.
• The embedding factors emphasize too much weight
on the low frequency domain, rather than equal
emphasis on the medium to high frequency
domains.
• The interrelationship of block classification and the
characteristics of the embedding location should be
further analysed.
For the first issue, the direct application of CSF for the HVS
in the wavelet transform domain needs to be further studied
[28–32] while the basis function of the wavelet
transformation is a critical factor affecting the visibility of
the noise in the DWT domain.
For the second issue, the watermark embedding in the low
frequency components results in high degradation of the
image fidelity.
How to get the best trade-off between the visibility of the
watermark and the capability of resistance for removal still
needs to be further justified. For the third issue, the plane,
edge and texture block classification in the study [27] is a
genuine approach.
However, the local and global characteristics of wavelet
coefficients should be carefully considered, and the content
adaptive approach is necessary for making the optimal
decision.
4.3. DES (Data Encryption Standard)
Data security research attracted a lot of interest in the
research community in areas like databases [33], data
mining [34], and Internet transaction [35, 36].
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 101
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010

The DES algorithm is the most widely known block cipher
in the world and even today, is resistant to most of practical
attacks. It was created by IBM and defined in 1977 as U.S.
standard FIPS 46. It is a 64-bit block cipher with 56 bit keys
and 16 rounds. A round in DES is a substitution
(confusion), followed by a permutation (diffusion).
For each 64-bit block of plaintext that DES processes, an
initial permutation is performed and the block is broken into
two 32-bit halves, a left half ( Li ) and a right half ( Ri ) .
The 16 rounds of substitutions and permutations, called
function f, are then performed. For each round, a DES round
key ( K i ) of 48 bits and the current Ri are input into
function f. The output of f is then XORed with the current
Li to give Ri +1 . The current Ri becomes Li +1 . After the 16
rounds, the two halves are rejoined and a final permutation
is the last step. This process is shown in Fig.1
KPDF document belong to him. Software programs consist
of two major entities: KPDF creator and KPDF viewer.
The KPDF creator as shown in (Fig.2) and the flowchart is
shown in (Fig.3):
1. Embedded digital watermark into PDF document
2. Generate string of the header which contain the
publisher info and the parameters value (Expire date,
Allow password, Allow print and Allow print screen)
then convert it into array of bytes then append last byte
that’s contain (Number of Header bytes)
3. Read the work document (watermark included or not)
into array of bytes then transposition the array of bytes
from Z to A into a new array of bytes
4. Create a new array of bytes that contain header bytes +
reverse bytes and one byte for the trailer which has
header length
5. To preserve the integrity of the digital watermark, an
asymmetric cryptographic algorithm (DES) is
employed using public key hashed to create a unique
32 character (256-bit)
6. Write the all bytes into the KPDF document

(a)

Figure 1. The DES algorithm

In January 1999, a DES cracking contest was held by RSA

Data Security Inc. After only 22 hours and 15 minutes, the
DES encrypted message was cracked by an international
team consisting of a custom hardware DES cracking device
built by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a
group of distributed computing enthusiasts known as
distributed.net. The EFF hardware cost $250,000 U.S. to
design and build. Creating a second device would be much
cheaper. Distributed.net used the idle CPU time of the
members’ computers at no extra cost. With more money, a
DES cracking hardware device could be built to decrypt
messages within a small number of hours or even minutes.
(b)
In this paper we will use the DES algorithm to encrypt the Figure 2. (a) KPDF Creator without watermark Selection
PDF documents. (b) KPDF Creator with watermark Selection

5. The Proposed Scheme

5.1 Embed and encrypt PDF document

The goal is to protect the copyright of the PDF document
after releasing it. It is assumed that the owner published the
KPDF document and keeps the source of the PDF document
for himself. By showing the watermark and the owner
details, the owner can prove that copies of the released
102
Figure 3. KPDF Creator flowchart
5.2. Decrypt document
The KPDF viewer as shown in (Fig.4) and the flowchart is
shown in (Fig.5):
1. Decrypt the KPDF document by the encryption key
2. Get the last byte from the document that’s has the
header byte length
3. Convert the header array of bytes to a string of
publisher information and parameters value like exp
(Expire date, Allow password, Allow print and Allow
print screen)
4. Transposition the reverse array to its original form
then write the array into PDF document
5. Display the PDF document into PDF control into the
main viewer
Figure 4. KPDF Viewer
Figure 5 KPDF Viewer flowchart
5.3. Discussion
KPDF converts existing PDF files to copy protected format
where digital watermarking has been proposed as a last line
of defense to protect PDF files copyright through visible
watermarks in such files. As well as, to preserve the
integrity of the digital watermark, an asymmetric
cryptographic algorithm (DES) is employed. The proposed
scheme shows that KPDF is generated by the software code
for the following reasons:
(IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security,
Vol. 2, No. 10, 2010
• Embedded digital watermark into PDF documents
• Protect PDF documents by Encryption Key
• Distribute secure PDF documents that cannot be
copied
• Prevent Print screen
• Stop ALL screen capture software
• Password protect PDF documents
• Prevent printing of PDF documents
• Set an expiry date for PDF documents validated by
time server
• Prevent extraction of original images and resources
6. Conclusion AND FUTURE WORK
The Portable Document Format is an almost universally
supported file format. During the past sixteen years it has
become a de facto standard for electronic document
distribution. Besides its portability, it provides its own
security features such as encryption and digital signature
and it is regarded as a secure document standard if com-
pared to other popular document file formats.
Portable Document Format is the most popular standard for
document exchange over the Internet .PDF files are
supported on almost all platforms, from common general
purpose operating systems and web browsers to more exotic
platforms, such as mobile phones and printers.
Such universal support is both a blessing and a burden. For
example, without doubt it is a blessing for authors, who can
trust that a PDF document can be read practically anywhere
by anybody.
However, at the same time all of these machines share a
common surface that is exposed and can be exploited. Being
very complex to parse – the ISO standard document is over
700 pages long – it is also vulnerable as implementation
errors are likely to happen. This is clearly visible from the
vulnerability history of Adobe Reader, which is by no means
Adobe’s problem alone but concerns all other
implementations of PDF readers and writers as well.
However, as
Adobe’s own Reader is likely to be the most common tool
for browsing PDF documents; it is also the one that is most
likely to be attacked.
We have presented a new method to digital watermarking of
PDF documents. Watermarking embeds ownership
information directly into the document, and it is proposed as
a ``last line of defense'' against unauthorized distribution of
digital media. Desirable properties of watermarks include
imperceptibility, robustness, and security. An application
showed how watermarking has been implemented for PDF
files with new algorithm. The success of these methods
encourages the development of more sophisticated
watermarking algorithms as part of a larger system for
protecting valuable digital documents.
In this digital watermarking process the watermark is
protected from any attacks by both transposition cipher and
asymmetric cryptographic algorithm, other ciphers functions
and asymmetric cryptographic algorithms should be
evaluated for future study.
A further study could be done to investigate how to make an
online registration and request your PDF documents online.
 (IJCNS) International Journal of Computer and Network Security, 103
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Author’s Profile

Karim Shamekh received the B.S.

degree in Computer Science from High
Technology Institute in 2006. During
2007-2010, he is preparing the M.S.
degree in Computers and Information
Systems from the Arab Academy for
Science, Technology and Maritime
Transport. His interests are concerned
with Information Security, Web Mining
and Image processing.

Dr. Ashraf Darwish received his PhD

degree in computer science in 2006
from computer science department at
Saint Petersburg State University
(specialization in Artificial
Intelligence), and joined as lecturer
(assistant professor) at the computer
science department, Faculty of Science,
Helwan University in 25 June 2006.

Dr. Mohamed Kouta received the B.S.

degree in Electrical Engineering from
Military Technical College in 1972. He
received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in
computer science from Jons Hopkins
University and Clarkson University in 1982
and 1985, respectively. He is the Chairman
of Business information system(BIS)
Department (Cairo Branch),college of
management and technology, Arab academy
for science and technology (AAST) and the Vice Dean for
Education.