Weak Password Security: An Empirical Study

ABSTRACT

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe Systems for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system. A PDF file can describe documents containing any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device independent and/or resolution independent format. It is now used everywhere across academic, technical, and governmental institutions. For secure communication, this platform and hardware independent file can be used as a secure cover media for voluminous data concealing. The methods develop so far for data hiding in PDF files satisfy low-embedding characteristics. In this work, we have developed two techniques. The first searches trash spaces in the PDF file and replaces them with the encrypted secret data. The second technique is useful for storing voluminous encrypted secret data without disturbing any format, features, or characteristics of the file. The practical implementation of this has been done on Microsoft platform. Experimental results show the feasibility of the proposed techniques.