Code for this project can be found here: https://github.com/nlitsme/pyPdfCrack
PDFS can be encrypted in several ways, the simplest being the std encryption, using an owner and user password.
A more secure way is to use password protected certificates.
In this post I describe how exactly these certificates are encrypted, and how they are used to decrypt a pdf.
Also I provide python code for parsing the certificate, pdf and do the decryption.
Finally I wrote some simple password cracking tools for the certificate.
How does it work
The certificate contains two encrypted parts, both encrypted with the same password.
+---------------------------------------------+
| Certificate.p12 |
+--------+-----+-------+----------------------+
| rc2-40 |salt2| count | encrypted ownercert |
+--------+-----+-------+----------------------+
| 3des-96|salt3| count | encrypted privatekey |
+--------+-----+-------+----------------------+
The first is the certificate owner information, basically a x.509 certificate. This part is encrypted using 40bit RC2, the key can easily be brute forced, less than a day’s work on a modern laptop. The second part contains the private rsa key for the owner certificate. This part is encrypted using Triple-DES with a 192 bit key. Both the 40bit RC2 key and 192bit 3DES key are derived from the certificate password by repeatedle doing a SHA1 of the salted password string.
<encrypted ownercert>
|
+----------+ v
| password |----+--->[genkey, salt2, 1]------> <key2> ----> [rc2] ----> <certificate>
+----------+ | |
+--->[genkey, salt2, 2]------> <iv2> ---------+
|
|
+--->[genkey, salt3, 2]------> <iv3> ---------+
| |
+--->[genkey, salt3, 1]------> <key3> ----> [3des] ----> <privatekey>
^
|
<encrypted privatekey>
So, by first cracking the 40bit RC2 key, and then using this as the target for a dictionary attack, one might be able to crack the encrypted rsa private key.
Note that both rc2 and 3des are used in cbc mode, with a IV calculated by the same salted keygeneration algorithm. When cracking the RC2 key, you don’t actually need the IV, just skip the first block, and use that as your brute force target. The IV for the second block will the the first cipher block.
+------------------------+
<privatekey> | Recipients(from pdf) |
| +------------------------+
| +-------------------------| rsa-encrypted(rc2-key) |
v V +------------------------+
[rsa decrypt] | rc2-encrypted(seed) |
| +------------------------+
<pkcs1.5 padded key> |
| v
+-------------------------------[rc2 decrypt]
|
v
<seed>
|
v
[sha1]
|
v
<masterkey>
Now that we have decrypted the certificate, in the PDF there is the Recipients string in the Encrypt dictionary.
This contains the pkcs8 encoded decryption seed.
First there is the RSA pubkey-encrypted 128-bit RC2 key, which decrypts the seed + permissions string.
The seed is used to calculate a mkey by taking the sha1 of the seed, the recipient, and perms.
The mkey is used to calculate per-object by taking the md5 of the mkey and the object id.
The objectkey is used to decrypt each object using AES.
+------------+-+-+-+-+-+---+---+---+---+
| masterkey | oid |gen| s | A | l | T | ---> [md5] ---> <objectkey>
+------------+-+-+-+-+-+---+---+---+---+ |
v
<ciphertext> ---> [AES] --> <plaintext>
Cracking a PKCS12 certificate
hexdump of the first couple of encrypted and decrypted blocks of the 40-bit RC2 encrypted certificate in test.p12:
2408c5d658c61cad 43036642daa47c52 9023df09863bd662 28c700fee6c81f86 ac5d3c4debda9148 0ac6535dd9574d06 << cipher text
3082____3082____ 060b2a864886f70d 010c0a0103a082__ __3082____060a2a 864886f70d010916 01a082____0482__ << plain text
The length dependent parts have been replaced with ‘____’. As you can see the 2nd block contains part of the ‘pkcs12’ OID representation, and will be the same for all PKCS12 encoded data.
So we can use this as the known plain + cipher pair target for the brute force encryption. Since the cipher is used in CBC mode, we have to XOR the plaintext with the 1st cipher block
2408c5d658c61cad XOR 060b2a864886f70d = 2203ef501040eba0
And then do a full 40-bit search for the key:
openssl_rc2_crack -e 43036642daa47c52 -p 2203ef501040eba0 -v
Running on a single core, this will take about 5 days.
Using the -f and -t parameters you can run several instances searching different parts
of the keyspace.
openssl_rc2_crack -e 43036642daa47c52 -p 2203ef501040eba0 -f 0x6896000000 -t 0x6896300000 -v
FOUND key: 689629ff1a
Note that this is the key in reverse byte order.
Now we can search for the passphrase using the following commandline.
cat wordlist.txt | openssl_pass_crack -s 68e8f778efe0db98453532b7ede8e0c09830ec81 -k 1aff299668 -i 1 -n 1024
FOUND key: kspass
Instead of cat wordlist.txt you can use JohnTheRipper for password generation:
john --wordlist=dict.txt --rules --stdout" | openssl_pass_crack ....
You can find these tools in the pyPdfCrack repository:
Pdf Decryption tool
Using sample data from itext7
Example code demonstating how pdf encryption with certificates works.
python3 decryptpdf.py encryptedWithCertificateAes128.pdf test.p12 kspass
Will output the following decrypted data:
priv b'a2d0faa52fee8453fe20150505050505'
cert b'37373532393731340808080808080808'
seed = b'cd532522a3f5943f66479ab8b0aa32d0609a0e18'
mkey= b'b1ce00167f01fc074d49d6fe18069b942ed9c428'
b'Author' b'Alexander Chingarev\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\r\r'
b'CreationDate' b"D:20160809103103-03'00'\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t"
b'Creator' b'iText 6\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t'
b'ModDate' b"D:20160809103103-03'00'\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t"
b'Producer' b'iText\xae 7.0.1-SNAPSHOT \xa92000-2016 iText Group NV (AGPL-version)\x02\x02'
The repeating sequences at the end of each decrypted text are the PKCS7 padding.
Pdf Parser
As a side project I created a simple PDF parser, which outputs the parsing stack plus a list of objects.
python pdfparser.py encryptedWithCertificateAes128.pdf
producing the following output: ( not yet with the pretty indenting )
[PdfComment: ascii:'PDF-1.7', PdfComment: hex:'e2e3cfd3',
PdfOperator: xref,
PdfNumber: 0, PdfNumber: 9,
PdfNumber: 0000000000, PdfNumber: 65535, PdfOperator: f,
PdfNumber: 0000000294, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfNumber: 0000000873, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfNumber: 0000000354, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfNumber: 0000000161, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfNumber: 0000000015, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfNumber: 0000000785, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfNumber: 0000000924, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfNumber: 0000003847, PdfNumber: 00000, PdfOperator: n,
PdfOperator: trailer, PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Encrypt, PdfReference: 00008.0,
PdfName: ID, PdfArray: [PdfHexdata: eadf305edab34545d11859b727274d71, PdfHexdata: eadf305edab34545d11859b727274d71],
PdfName: Info, PdfReference: 00003.0,
PdfName: Root, PdfReference: 00001.0,
PdfName: Size, PdfNumber: 9],
PdfComment: ascii:'iText-7.0.1-SNAPSHOT',
PdfOperator: startxref, PdfNumber: 4893]
00001: PdfObject: [PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Metadata, PdfReference: 00007.0,
PdfName: Pages, PdfReference: 00002.0,
PdfName: Type, PdfName: Catalog]]
00002: PdfObject: [PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Count, PdfNumber: 1,
PdfName: Kids, PdfArray: [PdfReference: 00004.0],
PdfName: Type, PdfName: Pages]]
00003: PdfObject: [PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Author, PdfString: hex:'5b97d367c7310b9d80761c86e66fa2c71dab01fb150e6fa4c55cb4bf80fac19cda79513966f9d6c1e938080fc8c87800',
PdfName: CreationDate, PdfString: hex:'5b97d367c7310b9d80761c86e66fa2c710cf138a9608a559cf8aa4e14fe9f97ee6e7ef89029fb1f7399dd9e64b0d7cab',
PdfName: Creator, PdfString: hex:'5b97d367c7310b9d80761c86e66fa2c7ee23708d7b3f6973b01ff75dae7e0fca',
PdfName: ModDate, PdfString: hex:'5b97d367c7310b9d80761c86e66fa2c710cf138a9608a559cf8aa4e14fe9f97ee6e7ef89029fb1f7399dd9e64b0d7cab',
PdfName: Producer, PdfString: hex:'5b97d367c7310b9d80761c86e66fa2c7ba3a4b524f422411b737667f5c50c98f8e864b96999ed6247270483364dd492a28c0a6f50da37bfe8e0ad618f419d4e77f31179bf7502fd8606af1b81e271ae3']]
00004: PdfObject: [PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Contents, PdfReference: 00005.0,
PdfName: MediaBox, PdfArray: [PdfNumber: 0, PdfNumber: 0, PdfNumber: 595, PdfNumber: 842],
PdfName: Parent, PdfReference: 00002.0,
PdfName: Resources, PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Font, PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: F1, PdfReference: 00006.0]],
PdfName: TrimBox, PdfArray: [PdfNumber: 0, PdfNumber: 0, PdfNumber: 595, PdfNumber: 842],
PdfName: Type, PdfName: Page]]
00005: PdfObject: [PdfStream: PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Filter, PdfName: FlateDecode,
PdfName: Length, PdfNumber: 80]]
00006: PdfObject: [PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: BaseFont, PdfName: Helvetica,
PdfName: Encoding, PdfName: WinAnsiEncoding,
PdfName: Subtype, PdfName: Type1,
PdfName: Type, PdfName: Font]]
00007: PdfObject: [PdfStream: PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: Length, PdfNumber: 2848,
PdfName: Subtype, PdfName: XML,
PdfName: Type, PdfName: Metadata]]
00008: PdfObject: [PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: CF, PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: DefaultCryptFilter, PdfDictionary: [
PdfName: CFM, PdfName: AESV2,
PdfName: Recipients, PdfArray: [PdfString: hex:'308201f706092a'...]]],
PdfName: Filter, PdfName: Adobe.PubSec,
PdfName: Length, PdfNumber: 128,
PdfName: R, PdfNumber: 4,
PdfName: StmF, PdfName: DefaultCryptFilter,
PdfName: StrF, PdfName: DefaultCryptFilter,
PdfName: SubFilter, PdfName: adbe.pkcs7.s5,
PdfName: V, PdfNumber: 4]]
Copyright (c) 2016 Willem Hengeveld itsme@xs4all.nl
