A couple of years ago, I created a GUI for the very popular Linux command line PDF password breaking tool, ‘PDFCrack’, by Henning Noren. At that time, I was still using Sourceforge a bit, so it was hosted there and I pretty much forgot about it.

Then the other day, I got a message from a user that reminded me it was still there. I visited and noticed the weekly downloads was around 40 per week! That was much more than I expected. But I guess for Linux users who need to gain access to a PDF file for which they have forgot the password or whatever, a simple GUI like this could be helpful (that’s why I made it in the first place but it was a timely reminder).

So, I decided to see if it needed a bit of a polish. I noticed a few issues myself immediately, having looked at it with fresh eyes…simple things like refresh intervals and general layout, so I made a few changes. Then I realised I didn’t even have a Github project for it, so I decided to get that created! Then I noticed that the backend tool, pdfcrack, had also recently been updated with a few new flags and some fixes to existing functionality. So it was up to v0.19, whereas my Sourceforge distributed version was using v0.16 from early 2017. So I downloaded the source code for that and compiled that as a binary as well to ship with v1.2 of PDFCrack-GUI.

Bundled it all up and created a new area here on the website for users to get it. That way it will remind me to keep it maintained going forward.

So, PDFCrack-GUI is now available HERE

The backend tool (pdfcrack) ships with it, but if you want to read more about it, read the project page, or just download it directly from its official page instead of here, then the page is HERE

There’s also a product entry in the bug tracker for users to submit issues about PDFCrack-GUI (not for pdfcrack though…please submit those via Sourceforge).