This is still a very broad request set, but a few comments: Xpdf can be patched to disregard copy/edit/print restrictions (those set with mast rather than user pass) - although the author has a statement on cracking - http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html. You can see a fast sample patch for 3.0.2 (verified) here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Adobe/Gallery/XPDF/hovland.txt and general instructions for older versions here: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Adobe/Gallery/xpdf-generic-patch.html These types of patches violate the Adobe implementation spec. FWIW. If you'd rather try to brute force passwords, you can always try pdfcrack (http://pdfcrack.sourceforge.net/). This may take a very long time on 128-bit encrypted PDFs depending on the speed of your hardware (although such tools also support masks, dictionaries, etc. Older 40-bit RC4 encrypted PDFs can generally be cracked rapidly with this and other tools (same for older .doc files - Googling will find you dozens of programs on and offline that do this). 40-bit passwords can be efficiently recovered (if you have a lot of disk space and tight time requirements) with rainbow tables; you can buy them (and the associated tools) from companies like Elcomsoft or run something like Cain and Abel if you want a front-end, or get free tables from http://www.freerainbowtables.com/ and run RainbowCrack (http://project-rainbowcrack.com/). Note that RC4 table support is not actually included in the free tools I've listed, I'm just making a point about hash cracking in general. Kam Woods Postdoctoral Research Associate School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 9:01 AM, Farrell, Larry D <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > At this point I was primarily targeting PDF and Microsoft Office files that would be passed on to our cataloging folks for manual inspection if they were DRM protected. As has been pointed out on the list, general DRM detection has far trickier than I'd initially thought. I've been using Apache Tika for file type detection, metadata and full text extraction. However, when parsing encrypted or password protected files it throws the less than unhelpful "Unexpected Runtime Exception". > > Dean