Secure
Password protect, unlock and clean up PDF documents. All 2 tools are free, with no sign-up and no watermark.
About secure
A PDF can carry two different passwords, and knowing which you need saves a lot of confusion. A user password is required to open the document at all. An owner password leaves it readable but restricts printing, copying or editing. Protecting a file here sets a password so that only people you give it to can open it.
The encryption is real, so the password matters: there is no recovery process and no way back into a file whose password has been lost. Send the password by a different route from the document itself — a file and its password in the same email are protected from nobody who can read the email.
Unlocking removes a password from a document you can already open, for the ordinary case of a file you protected yourself, or one sent to you with the password, that you now need to work with freely. It is not a way into a document you do not have the password for, and nothing here will do that.
Secure — frequently asked questions
No. The encryption is genuine, which is the entire point of using it — there is no back door and no reset. The only routes are the password itself or the original file it was made from.