PDF Password Protection

Add a password without uploading the file

🔒 See this tool’s privacy notes for local processing and external service details. Site analytics are described in our privacy policy.
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Browser-only decryption cannot currently preserve PDF text, links, and forms safely, so decrypt is disabled.

Quick guide

What can PDF Password Protection help you do?

Add AES-128 password protection to a PDF locally in your browser. Decryption is intentionally unavailable because a safe document-preserving implementation is not supported.

Best for

Use this to create a password-required copy of a PDF that the tool can load normally. Only encryption is currently enabled; decryption is disabled. It cannot recover a forgotten password or remove protection from an encrypted document it cannot load.

How to use it

Choose a PDF, enter a nonempty password twice with matching values, and start processing. Keep the source file. The download gains an _encrypted suffix; reopen that copy in your intended PDF reader to check the password and document contents.

How to read the result

The code uses the same user and owner password. It allows high-resolution printing and copying while setting modification and annotation permissions to false. These settings are supplied to PDF readers, not a guarantee against screenshots or universally enforced operation restrictions.

Privacy and limits

The file and password are passed to the encryption library in page memory, with no document-upload request in this workflow. The library loads from unpkg.com as @cantoo/pdf-lib. Password fields are not automatically cleared after processing, so handle the open page and downloaded copy carefully.

The tool provides no encryption-strength report or validation of every reader's permission handling. Recheck text, forms, and links in the intended reader. A successful download is not a confidentiality guarantee, and this tool offers no recovery route if you lose the password.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can this tool decrypt a PDF?

No. Browser-only decryption is disabled because the available workaround would rasterize pages and damage document content.

How strong is the encryption?

The output uses the PDF 1.7 standard security handler with AES-128.

Is my file uploaded?

No. Everything runs via pdf-lib in your browser.