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Inspiring
July 26, 2011
Question

Expiration date on PDF password.

  • July 26, 2011
  • 1 reply
  • 35806 views

Hello, everyone.

I would like to set-up an expiration date and/or time on a password assigned to a document to limit access to it.

Is there a way (simple, hopefully) to do this ?

Thanks in advance.

    1 reply

    try67
    Adobe Expert
    July 26, 2011

    This can be done with either a very expensive DRM solution, or with a very insecure script.

    Inspiring
    July 26, 2011

    Hi, try67.

    Thanks again for your reply.

    I thought that perhaps Acrobat would offer this option to limit access to PDF files. This would be a nice feature.

    Aside from the two options you offer, can you think of any other way to do this ? How about third party applications ? Does Acrobat allow the use of third party plug-ins ? In this case, is there any that could do this ?

    Thanks again.

    try67
    Adobe Expert
    July 26, 2011

    This is technically very complicated to achieve. What if the user changes

    the date on their computer? The date will need to be verified from an

    external source, and what if that's not available? And so forth...

    Adobe does offer this service, but in the form a DRM server, costing (tens

    of) thousands of dollars.

    Yes, it's possible to install third-party plugins in Acrobat, but I don't

    know of any such tool that applies expiration dates to PDFs. You could ask

    the good folks over at the Acrobat SDK forum, though.