PDFForge

Two Modes: Protect and Unlock

Protect mode encrypts your PDF with AES-128 encryption and requires a password before anyone can open the document. You can also set an owner password (which controls permissions) separately from the user password (which controls opening). This is the standard way to restrict access to sensitive documents before sharing them by email, cloud storage or USB.

Unlock mode removes the password from a PDF that you already have permission to access. This is useful when a PDF was password-protected a long time ago and now needs to be shared with a team, or when the password requirement is getting in the way of using other PDF tools that cannot handle encrypted files.

PDF Permission Settings

When protecting a PDF, you can set fine-grained permissions that control what recipients are allowed to do with the document, even after they enter the password to open it. Standard permission flags include:

• Allow printing — Whether the document can be printed at all, and at what quality.
• Allow copying text and images — Whether content can be selected and copied to the clipboard.
• Allow editing — Whether the document can be modified in a PDF editor.
• Allow form filling — Whether interactive form fields can be filled in.
• Allow annotations — Whether comments and markup can be added.

These restrictions rely on PDF viewer compliance — professional PDF viewers like Adobe Acrobat respect them, though some third-party tools may not enforce them. For strong security, combine permission flags with a strong encryption password.

When Should You Password-Protect a PDF?

Password protection is appropriate any time you need to control access to a document before sharing it. Common use cases include sharing financial statements or tax documents with an accountant, sending legal contracts that should only be readable by named parties, distributing exam papers that should not be accessible before the exam, sharing medical records with authorised personnel, and distributing proprietary reports to paying subscribers or clients. The key advantage of PDFForge is that your documents are never uploaded — the encryption happens entirely in your browser, so there is no risk of the file being intercepted during a server-side processing step.

Is Browser-Based PDF Encryption Secure?

PDFForge uses the PDF-Lib library to apply AES-128 encryption, which is the standard used across professional PDF tools. Browser-based encryption is actually more secure than many online services in one important way: your file never travels across the internet to be encrypted on a remote server. The encryption key is generated on your device and the encrypted file is produced locally. No one — not even PDFForge — can intercept your document or your password during the process.