Protect PDF

What Protect PDF does

Protect PDF encrypts a document with a password so it cannot be opened without it, using standard PDF encryption applied in your browser.

Password-protecting a PDF is what you do before a document travels somewhere you do not fully control — an email thread, a shared drive, a messaging app. Without the password the file is unreadable, whoever ends up holding it.

The encryption is the standard one built into the PDF format, so the file opens normally in Acrobat, Preview, Chrome or any other reader once the password is entered. It is applied on your device, which means the one thing you would least like to upload — a confidential document and the password to it — never goes anywhere.

How to use Protect PDF

1. 1

   Upload the PDF

   Drop in the document you want to protect.

2. 2

   Set a password

   Enter your password and confirm it. Choose something you will not lose.

3. 3

   Protect and download

   Click Protect PDF. The encrypted file downloads immediately.

Protect PDF: details and limits

• If you forget the password, the document cannot be recovered — by you or by us. Nothing about it is stored anywhere, and there is no reset link by design. Put the password somewhere safe before you send the file.

• The password is required to open the document at all, not merely to edit it.

• Standard PDF encryption is used, so the file opens in any mainstream PDF reader once the password is supplied.

• A password protects the file, not the information once it is open. Anyone you give the password to can save an unprotected copy.

• Your document title and author are encrypted along with the pages, so they survive intact — anyone you give the password to can read them, and they come back exactly as they were.