ISO 32004: an overview

Introduction

For a few years now, the PDF industry has been working on a new mechanism to improve integrity protection in encrypted documents. ISO/TC 171/SC 2, the committee that manages the PDF standard, took ownership of that effort in the form of the ISO 32004 project.

A few months ago, that project moved into the DTS stage—the final step prior to publication! Now’s a great time to go over which problems ISO 32004 sets out to solve, and perhaps more importantly, which problems it doesn’t solve. Since I’ve been leading the project for the past year, I figured that I was in a good position to provide that write-up.

The goal of this post is not to explain what ISO/DTS 32004 says exactly, nor to tell you how you should implement it at the technical level. Rather, I want to help other PDF developers understand the context of the document so they can make better use of it.

Motivation

Life in PDF-land without integrity protection

A few years ago, a team of security researches at the Ruhr University Bochum described a number of attacks against PDF’s encryption feature set.

Broadly, the attacks announced fall into two categories.

• data exfiltration tricks allowing an attacker to smuggle data out of an authorised user’s working environment;
• content manipulation exploits that allow encrypted PDF files to be changed without knowledge of the encryption key, and without downstream users noticing.

The former category is more properly classified as exploiting the behaviour of specific viewers, and that’s not what this post is about. However, the latter set of attacks really point to issues with the specification itself. Here are some of the highlights.

First up, we have cryptographic malleability issues.

• As of ISO 32000-2:2020, PDF supports RC4 (legacy) and AES-CBC for content encryption out of the box. Both of these schemes are unauthenticated, i.e. don’t allow the decrypter to determine cryptographically whether a ciphertext has been tampered with. This is already problematic, but in the case of PDF, relatively difficult to exploit directly; it requires a little extra help.
• Unfortunately, that extra help is provided by a little piece of ciphertext with a known plaintext required by ISO 32000-2:2020’s most recent security handler. That actually allows for systematic injection of attacker-controlled content. If you’re interested, give the RUB team’s explanation of CBC malleability a read.

Moreover, there are also fundamental ways in which the design of the PDF standard’s encryption features leaves documents wide open to manipulation, irrespective of any cryptographic issues.

• In PDF, only streams and strings are encrypted. All other objects can be manipulated freely.
• A PDF file’s cross-reference data, which acts as a “roadmap” of sorts for the document, is never encrypted, and can be manipulated to do all sorts of crazy things.
• Did I mention that you can also straight up delete encrypted objects with impunity?
• Even better: ISO 32000-2:2020 allows “local” encryption overrides through the Identity crypt filter. This feature was intended to allow things like file metadata to remain unencrypted if desired, but actually allows entire streams, pages, images, etc. to be replaced with attacker-controlled ones as long as they declare themselves as unencrypted. Oops.

So, the upshot is this: given a legitimate encrypted PDF document, a sufficiently clever attacker can make the document say whatever they want without knowing the key. If an unsuspecting user then opens the document in their favourite viewer, they’ll get a password prompt—as they probably expected. When the correct password is entered, the viewer will dutifully display the attacker-controlled content, and our poor user is none the wiser.

This is a problem, because in the mind of a business user—and the same probably goes for most tech people!—something being “password-protected” is pretty much synonymous with “kept under lock and key”. People expect password-protected data to be totally inaccessible and untouchable without knowledge of the password. This expectation is being subverted by PDF’s approach to encrypting documents. Clearly, something had to be done…

Authenticated encryption

The mismatch between users’ (by no means unreasonable) expectations and reality is due to conflation of the following two security properties:

• Data confidentiality means that the data can’t be read without the key.
• Data authentication is necessary to ensure that data can’t be altered without knowing the key.

Historically, the authentication aspect was not a concern in the design of PDF’s encryption features. That point of view is now very dated¹, but the benefit of hindsight doesn’t really help us solve the issue at hand. So, what can we do?

In modern cryptographic practice, the authentication problem is typically addressed by augmenting the ciphertext with a Message Authentication Code (MAC). A MAC is a kind of keyed² digest, computed over the ciphertext. Tampering with the ciphertext invalidates the MAC, and to recompute the MAC, you need access to the key. The idea is that the receiving party independently computes the MAC over the given ciphertext prior to decryption, and rejects the message if the result doesn’t match the value supplied by the sender.

There are many different ways to construct MACs. Here are some examples:

• HMAC is a family of MACs constructed from a hash algorithm (e.g. HMAC-SHA256). The cryptographic strength of the resulting MAC depends on that of the underlying hash function. HMAC is very widely used, and has also been adopted by ISO/DTS 32004.
• Poly1305 is a MAC scheme that essentially works by considering the message as a polynomial over a finite field (the field of order 2¹³⁰ - 5, incidentally), and evaluating that polynomial at the key. It’s commonly used in conjunction with ChaCha, including in TLS.
• CBC-MAC is a (somewhat dated) MAC scheme that works by keeping the last block of a CBC encryption operation as a MAC. It used to be popular before HMAC gained widespread adoption, but is less common now.
• GMAC is the MAC scheme that lies at the basis of the AES-GCM authenticated encryption algorithm.
• KMAC is a more recent MAC scheme that one gets more or less “for free” from the fact that the design of SHA-3 (Keccak) is resistant against length extension attacks.

Most authenticated encryption schemes in common use—including AES-GCM, AES-CCM, ChaChaPoly1305 and many others—are constructed by combining an encryption primitive with a MAC function³.

So, having digested all that information, it seems that all we have to do is to apply a MAC to our encrypted data. Now, let’s figure out how that’s supposed to work in a PDF document.

Design philosophy

General design

The initial requirements of the PDF MAC project were more or less the following.

• Find a way to protect entire (encrypted) PDF files using a MAC.
• Leverage the shared secret behind the encryption (usually a password) to provide keying material⁴ for the MAC process.
• Make sure the system is backwards compatible: files with MACs should remain readable to non-MAC-aware processors.
• At the same time, there needs to be a degree of protection against attackers removing MACs.

The MAC scheme standardised in ISO/DTS 32004 integrates into PDF in much the same way as digital signatures.

• There’s a ByteRange to indicate the covered portion of the document.
• The actual MAC token is stored in the “hole” left by the declared ByteRange.
• Like signatures, MACs are embedded using CMS—although we use AuthenticatedData instead of SignedData for obvious reasons (see RFC 5652).

Compatibility with digital signatures

This ByteRange-based approach works well enough, but there’s a snag: any given revision of a PDF file can only have a single “complete” ByteRange! Early drafts of ISO/DTS 32004 solved this problem by decreeing that MACs could only be used in unsigned documents.

Since MACs and digital signatures serve very different purposes, that incompatibility didn’t sit well with me. Especially since there’s an easy, backwards-compatible solution! PDF signatures use CMS SignedData, which supports attributes, so we could simply let the MAC token “hitch a ride” on the signature. That way we only need a single ByteRange to make both the signature and the MAC work⁵. The structure of the MAC token is otherwise pretty much the same as in the unsigned case.

While signatures in encrypted documents aren’t a very common sight, we occasionally come across signed encrypted documents. By allowing MACs in any encrypted document, we can achieve (more or less) the same integrity guarantees for all such documents. This uniformity also benefits validation: a MAC checker with zero signature validation capabilities shouldn’t have to make judgment calls about whether documents with a signature (and no MAC) are adequately protected. In addition, the fix was simple enough that sacrificing compatibility wasn’t worth it. After some discussion, we decided to put it in the spec.

Compatibility/security trade-off

In the PDF world, backwards compatibility is a big deal. When new functionality is considered for standardisation, one of the most important criteria involves evaluating how existing software would cope with the change.

This was no different for ISO/DTS 32004: a document with a MAC still needs to be understood by software that doesn’t know how MACs work. That, in itself, is a good thing.

The converse problem is more tricky, though: how can a MAC-aware processor tell the difference between a “legacy” document without a MAC, and a document from which the MAC has been (maliciously) stripped?⁶ Paranoid implementations could perhaps enforce MACs rigorously, but that might not be feasible for everyone.

To address this concern, ISO/DTS 32004 defines an extra permission bit to indicate whether a MAC is expected to be present. Since the permission bits are already protected by a “pseudo-MAC” of sorts⁷ in PDF 2.0, there’s a degree of tamper-resistance built in.

Pitfalls and judgment calls

User passwords

PDF’s standard security handler distinguishes between “user passwords” and “owner passwords”. It’s somewhat common for people to apply encryption to a PDF document, but leave the user password empty, while still setting the owner password to something else. This is the digital equivalent of a “No Trespassing” sign on an unguarded fence. Sure, bona fide viewers will enforce permission bits if the owner password is not supplied, but nonetheless, anyone can compute the file encryption key if the user password is left empty.

In other words, from a purely technical perspective, anyone can decrypt and modify the document content. This is no different in a scenario where MACs are used: if the user password is empty, anyone can validate, but also regenerate the MAC. In other words, a MAC offers precisely zero protection in this situation.

In fact, if I’d write some piece of software that required MACs for everything, I’d actively reject PDF files with empty user passwords.

Coverage checks

A MAC should cover the entire document to which it is applied (other than the MAC container itself). As with digital signatures, coverage is indicated by the associated ByteRange. When receiving a document with a MAC, it’s very important to check the ByteRange: if the covered region is too small, unauthorised changes could still lurk in the “unprotected” regions. Processors incrementally updating a document are also expected to update the MAC (including the coverage range).

This presents a problem: what to do when one receives a document with a “stale” MAC (i.e. a MAC that doesn’t cover the full document anymore). That could be the result of a malicious edit, but also due to an authorised change by a tool that doesn’t implement ISO/DTS 32004.

Again, this one boils down to choosing compatibility vs. security, and there’s no easy answer. Personally, I would write my implementation to reject such documents by default.

On by default: yes or no?

Cryptographically, speaking, adding MACs to all⁸ encrypted PDF documents seems like the obvious thing to do. Ultimately, the security of the MAC process is protected by the same shared secret as the document encryption, so there’s no need to involve external keying material (as would’ve been the case with signatures). In particular, the user doesn’t necessarily need to do anything special to benefit from MACs.

That said, MACs do come with an I/O performance cost. As with signatures, the PDF data needs to be serialised to a place where the MAC can be inserted in-place later. Depending on application architecture, that cost might be completely negligible, or prohibitive⁹. I’d still recommend turning it on by default if you can—especially when updating files that already have MACs!

Conclusion

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