How to read PDFs created with an unknown random owner password?

Question

Requirement is to process a batch of PDF\'s one at a time and on success encrypt each of them with an user password.

However, these PDF\'s were encrypted previously

Answer 1

PdfReader has an undocumented static boolean variable named unethicalreading. For obvious reasons, this variable is set to false by default. You could set this variable to true like this:

PdfReader.unethicalreading = true;

From now on, PdfReader will ignore the presence of an owner password. It will only throw an exception if a user password is in place.

Use this at your own risk.