Syn_Attck

I'm really liking this, thank you for the suggestion.

Whatever the format, let's hope it doesn't end up having the extension .map

(minor attracted persons aka PDF file joke)

Wow, this is awesome, thanks!

Unless you know specifically what they're adding or changing this wouldn't work. If they have a hidden 'barcode' and you add another hidden 'barcode' or modify the image in a way to remove some or all of theirs, they'd still be able to read theirs.

You should spread that idea around more, it's pretty ingenious. I'd add first converting to B&W if possible.

This is a great point. Image watermarking steganography is nearly impossible to defeat unless you can obtain multiple copies of the 'same' file from multiple users to look for differences. It could be a change of a single 5-15 pixels from one rgb code off.

rgb(255, 251, 0)

to

rgb(255, 252, 0)

Which would be imperceptable to the human eye. Depending on the number of users it may need to change more or less pixels.

There is a ton of work in this field and its very interesting, for anyone considering majoring in computer science / information security.

Another 'neat' technology everyone should know about is machine identification codes, or, the tiny ~~secret~~ tracking dots that color printers print on every page to identify the specific make, model, and serial number (I think?) of the printer the page was printed from. I don't believe B&W printers have tracking dots, which were originally used to track creators of counterfeit currency. EFF has a page of color printers which do not include tracking dots on printed pages. This includes color LaserJets along with InkJets, although I would not be surprised if there was a similar tracking feature in place now or in the future "for safety and privacy reasons," but none that I am aware of.

Good question. I believe the browser "Print to PDF" function simply saves the loaded PDF to a PDF file locally, so it wouldn't work (if I'm correct.)

I'm not an expert in this field, but you can ask on StackExchange or the author of MAT or exiftool. You can also do it yourself (I'll explain how) by making a PDF with a jpg file with your metadata, opening it and printing to pdf, and then extract the image Do let us know your findings! I'm on a smartphone so can't do it.

If you do try it yourself, a note from the linked SE page is that you won't be able to extract the original file extension (it's unknown, so you either have to know what it is, or look at the file headers, or try all extensions), so if you use your own .jpg with your own exif data, rename to .jpg when finished (I believe exif is handled differently based on file type.)

There are multiple tools to add exif data to an image but the exiftool website has some easy examples for our purpose.

(do this as the first step before adding to the PDF)

(command line here, but there are exiftool GUIs)

exiftool -artist="Phil Harvey" -copyright="2011 Phil Harvey" YourFile.jpg

Adds Phil Harvey and the copyright information to the file. If you're on a smartphone and have the time and really have to know, then hypothetically there should be web-based tools for every step needed. I'm just not familiar with any and it's possible the web-based tool would remove the metadata when creating or extracting the PDF.

@[email protected] has whored his karma already, he isn't answering these additional questions which call into question his false assumptions.

It's not, technically, but if I have sensitive documents on my phone and a law officer is trying to get me to unlock my phone, I will be entering and/or putting the duress code into my phone. GrapheneOS has 'lockdown' button by 'restart' and 'shutdown' all of which will require a passphrase to unlock, even if you normally have fingerprint enabled for X hours each time of use.

So it's semi-related in that GrapheneOS protects against this type of attack.

It's new as of about 1-2 months ago.

Passcode. Not fingerprint.

Unfortunately that wouldn't work as this is information inside the PDF itself so it has nothing to do with the file hash (although that is one way to track.)

Now that this is known, It's not enough to remove metadata from the PDF itself. Each image inside a PDF, for example, can contain metadata. I say this because they're apparently starting a game of whack-a-mole because this won't stop here.

There are multiple ways of removing ALL metadata from a PDF, here are most of them.

It will be slow-ish and probably make the file larger, but if you're sharing a PDF that only you are supposed to have access to, it's worth it. MAT or exiftool should work.

Edit: as spoken about in another comment thread here, there is also pdf/image steganography as a technique they can use.