PDF Tech

Foxit’s Approach to PDF Security

by Conor Smith | January 28, 2019

Working for Foxit, it’s easy to see how PDF security is always of the highest priority for us. The PDF industry is responsible for over 2 billion digital documents generated each year across every industry. That’s a lot of opportunity for someone with bad intentions to exploit.

With continuous upgrades and new technologies added to the PDF format, we must deal with additional possibilities for breaches. Ensuring our PDF SDK is more secure with every release is one of the biggest challenges a PDF software company with Foxit’s scale faces.

Recently, we have improved internal security guidelines and procedures. These procedures allow us to integrate different business units and teams when it comes to security. Reporting, verifying and collaboratively testing vulnerabilities is leading Foxit into one centralized security core. This means consistency from all sides with our SDKs.

Below is just an idea of our current PDF security measures:

  • Rights management services (including IP whitelisting, user access, printing)
  • Printer restrictions
  • Security watermarks
  • Digital Rights Management
  • Dynamic revocation (ability to remove access to documents which have already been issued)
  • Encrypted PDF files (40-bit RC4, 128-bit RC4, 128-bit AES, 256-bit AES PDF2.0)
  • Dynamic Redaction (redacts certain contents based on permissions)
  • The ability to display viewer identity information on protected PDF files (provides additional security to protected files from being compromised by users’ cameras/smartphones and video capture)

We provide a very consistent set of PDF products that make it easier to protect your documents. We build our products with the utmost concern for security, growth and resilience with any changes we make.

The addition of support for a newer version of Azure’s RMS (IRMv2) security in 2018 to our SDKs is a great example of that. Additionally, the security upgrades we made to Phantom and Foxit Reader functionality in the past year only shows our commitment to the security of our products and quick response to any possible attack. These include extended protection against command injections in the JS API and Microsoft’s NTLM protocol, and more secure file writing functions. Not to mention our leading technology in digital signature functionality.

All of this brings us back to the word “scale”. Keeping an industry-leading level of security is a requirement that takes an industry-leading team, with state-of-the-art technology and execution. It’s due to our experience, tireless work on security and customer service that our community keeps expanding. More and more, businesses choose Foxit as the go-to PDF vendors not only for our products, but also for the security and reliability they provide.

PDF security will always be a primary focus for Foxit. We have enabled thousands of software developers to implement state-of-the-art PDF functionality that no other competitor can offer. Get in touch below for a free trial and see what the next generation of PDF looks like.