With regulatory compliance issues impacting organizations of every size and in every market, reducing the risk that confidential information will fall into unauthorized hands requires IT to revisit PDF-level encryption, especially in the absence of a formal Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Security Support in Adobe Acrobat

Securing PDFs at the client-level is unnecessary when PDFs reside in enterprise content repositories that provide user-level access controls, such as file systems and document management systems. However, when a PDF is distributed beyond the control boundaries of these systems, document-level encryption must be considered for confidential files.

Adobe Acrobat supports five basic categories of document-level security:

• Document open password. A single password can be specified to restrict opening the PDF or making changes. Since only the end user knows the password, the organization will not be able to decrypt these PDFs if the user leaves the company. In this scenario, Acrobat employs strong encryption techniques...