With online documentation growing more valuable every day in terms of commercial and monetary benefits, securing documents by avoiding their duplication has become the need of the hour.

Various means have been used to ensure that confidential documents can only be viewed and not duplicated by any means for personal benefits.

To cater to this ever-growing need of securing documents, there are many ways of implementing access controls, such as passwords or registration codes which are keys to open a document. A Pdf Lock is one of the techniques for denying access to PDF encoded information.

Ensuring the PDF Is Locked

A typical PDF lock achieved with hardware is a “dongle”. A dongle is a piece of hardware that must be present in order for the PDF lock to be opened. Other types of PDF locks are implemented with software and these may require registration codes, user identification codes, and network or machine addresses to be present.

A good PDF lock has various security features. It checks independently whether the user or machine it is working on has been registered for the document in question. It can also obtain secrets needed to form the key and ensures that the use of the key is valid. This kind of PDF lock is, therefore, much more subtle and breaking the PDF lock is much more complicated.

So, a PDF lock is not a simple on or off mechanism, but rather a granular and layered architecture.

Stop PDF Sharing with PDF Digital Rights Management

PDF Digital Rights Management (DRM) provides document protection by using a range of DRM and licensing controls. These document controls prevent PDF printing, editing and copying as well as sharing, thus enabling secure distribution of your PDF files. Documents can be locked to specific devices, IP addresses and country locations to ensure they are not shared with others.

Restrict PDF Printing

A PDF protection program ensures that printing of PDF documents is not possible by default. So, the author does not need to apply any additional controls to stop a PDF being printed. The author can also give some users access to print the PDF, while denying the same access to others. Printouts can also contain user identification in the form of a watermark that is automatically applied at print time.

Lock PDFs from Editing

Such software also disables PDF editing and modifying as it provides no optional feature to enable users to use secure PDF viewers to edit or alter the content. By not allowing the editing of the files, the software ensures complete security for the documents.

Protect PDFs from Copying

A PDF protection program stops users from duplicating text and other content within a document as there is no copy-paste option available. Protected PDF files can only be opened by authorized users on authorized devices.

Prevent Saving a PDF or Using the Save As Function

Preventing document sharing and editing alone will not address the problem; the Save As feature should also be disabled (or not made available), thereby restricting duplication in unprotected formats. So, secure PDF viewers have no ‘Save As’ functionality and so the document is rendered useless to unauthorized recipients as they need the correct decryption keys to open them.

So, if you want to make your PDF documents view only then look for a PDF DRM solution that locks PDF files so they cannot be edited or printed.

Author Bio:

Karishma is a professional blogger. Most of her writing includes on tech related subjects with best insights and opinions. Currently she is writing articles for Locklizard, company that is specialized in digital rights management security for PDF documents.