Add AES-256 password protection to confidential files or remove known restrictions from owned documents.
Applies or unlocks industry-standard AES encryption to control permissions for viewing, printing, copying, and form editing.
Securing sensitive payroll data before emailing, or stripping forgotten edit passwords from internal archives.
Ranked by feature completeness, privacy safety, and ease of use.
Comprehensive suite of web PDF editing, merging, conversion, and compression tools.
iLovePDF is one of the most widely used online PDF toolboxes, providing instant file compression, merging, splitting, OCR text extraction, and PDF to Word/Office conversion.
100% free online PDF toolbox with unlimited usage and offline desktop options.
PDF24 is a completely free, privacy-friendly online PDF suite that offers unlimited document compression, merging, editing, and conversion with zero paywalls.
Polished document management suite with e-signatures and OCR conversion.
Smallpdf delivers a modern, high-precision web PDF editor, offering e-signing, AI document summarization, scan OCR, and seamless cloud syncing.
In-browser interactive PDF text editing, form filling, and page extraction.
Sejda is one of the few web tools that allows you to directly edit existing text inside a PDF, fill out interactive forms, add annotations, and sign documents.
Common questions and practical advice for completing this task.
For strongly encrypted user passwords (AES-256), brute-force recovery is computationally infeasible without the original key. Tools can only remove owner permission restrictions or unlock files with known passwords.