PDF Cleaner

Introducing PDF Cleaner
PDF files are commonly distributed among office workers and for personal use. However, many people don’t realize that they are extremely dangerous due to the vulnerabilities that they can contain. These Adobe Acrobat PDF vulnerabilities can cause great harm to your computer and personal files. Even worse, once Adobe identifies a vulnerability, it usually takes them quite a while to fix it which gives hackers time to do their damage. This leaves all Adobe Acrobat users at risk while they are waiting on the patch. PDF Cleaner removes these exploits from the PDF file even when Adobe doesn’t know about them yet. This makes it safe to open the file in the unpatched PDF reader without risk. That being said, PDF Cleaner is still in the experimental phase, so users should not rely on it as their only security measure.

How Does PDF Cleaner Work?
PDF Cleaner removes exploits from PDF files by converting the PDF to a PostScript file before converting it back into a PDF file. This conversion process ensures that any exploits in the original PFD file are removed before it is converted back into a PDF. Since the PostScript format is almost identical to a PDF, the new PDF file will almost always function exactly the same as the original one.

Watch PDF Cleaner in Action
Watch PDF Cleaner in action as I open a PDF file containing an exploit for an older version of Foxit reader. The exploit causes Foxit to crash anytime that the PDF is opened. However, after the PDF file has been run through PDF Cleaner, Foxit can safely open the file without crashing. The exploit used here is in the metasploit framework. It’s called “windows/fileformat/foxit_title_bof” and is described as “Foxit PDF Reader v4.1.1 Title Stack Buffer Overflow”.