Dangerzone

A FOSS tool used for .pdf files cleaning from potential malware, which also can delete metadata, is DangerZone. Probably overkill for simple metadata cleaning, but worth mentioning nonetheless. https://dangerzone.rocks/

Freedom of the Press Foundation is looking for an ONSITE Senior IT/Infra Engineer for its New York City (Brooklyn) offices, with the flexibility to work from home on select days. Salary is $105,000-$130,000, depending on experience. Benefits include health, vision & dental insurance, generous paid leave policy, 401(k) match. FPF is a ~40 person org, with a bit less than half of that being engineering -- we're an unusually tech-forward nonprofit, maintaining projects like SecureDrop (https://securedrop.org/) and Dangerzone (https://dangerzone.rocks/). This role is tasked with internal IT engineering leadership, as well as additional infra support to the whole org. More info / apply here: https://grnh.se/2d57657e5us

Rather than a PDF reader, how about a PDF sanitizer? I've heard of Dangerzone [1][2], though I've never used it. [1] https://github.com/freedomofpress/dangerzone [2] https://dangerzone.rocks/

Yes there is: Dangerzone (https://dangerzone.rocks/) Converts incoming documents into a PDF that is a sequence of filtered/optimised images. Dangerzone will also handle office docs, epub, and a lot of different image formats (e.g. SVG and others that can possibly contain active content).

Micah Lee also made Dangerzone [1] a tool to safely convert untrusted pdf files to safe-to-open pdf files, wrote the book Hacks, Leaks, and Revalations [2] and he made Tor-Browser-Launcher [3] and he's a respected investigative journalist: https://micahflee.com/ [1] https://dangerzone.rocks/ [2] https://hacksandleaks.com/ [3] https://github.com/torproject/torbrowser-launcher

This is mentioned on the release page (https://ddosecrets.com/wiki/Roskomnadzor) as well: > Users are advised to be extra careful as some directories, like ПОЧТА Приемная, appear to contain large numbers of email attachments. Email attachments are often a vector of malware and phishing attempts, so use caution and tools like Dangerzone (https://dangerzone.rocks/) and others. > This dataset was released in the buildup to, in the midst of, or in the aftermath of a cyberwar or hybrid war. Therefore, there is an increased chance of malware, ulterior motives and altered or implanted data, or false flags/fake personas. As a result, we encourage readers, researchers and journalists to take additional care with the data.

The tweet author also mentions these tools than can help in cleaning PDFs: exiftool: https://exiftool.org qpdf: https://qpdf.sourceforge.io dangerzone (GUI, render PDF as images, then re-OCR everything): https://dangerzone.rocks mat2 (render PDF as images, don't OCR): https://0xacab.org/jvoisin/mat2

Maybe this is good enough for your use case: https://dangerzone.rocks/ It converts documents to just images, then converts those back to PDF, all in a sandbox.

You could also use Dangerzone [0]. It opens a document in two docker containers and converts it into a safe version. It was created by the director of infosec at The Intercept. [0] https://dangerzone.rocks/

From the tool description linked: > Dangerzone works like this: You give it a document that you don't know if you can trust (for example, an email attachment). Inside of a sandbox, Dangerzone converts the document to a PDF (if it isn't already one), and then converts the PDF into raw pixel data: a huge list of RGB color values for each page. Then, outside of the sandbox, Dangerzone takes this pixel data and converts it back into a PDF. With this in mind, Dangerzone wouldn't even remove conventional watermarks (that inlay small amounts of text on the image). I think the "freedomofpress" GitHub repo primed you to think about protecting someone leaking to journalists, but really it's designed to keep journalists (and other security-minded folk) safe from untrusted attachments. The official website -- https://dangerzone.rocks/ -- is a lot more clear about exactly what the tool does. It removes malware, removes network requests, supports various filetypes, and is open source. Their about page ( https://dangerzone.rocks/about/ ) shows common use cases for journalists and others.

Related: https://dangerzone.rocks/ https://github.com/freedomofpress/dangerzone > Take potentially dangerous PDFs, office documents, or images and convert them to safe PDFs. From the learn more about page: > Dangerzone was inspired by TrustedPDF but it works in non-Qubes operating systems, which is important, because most of the journalists I know use Macs and probably won’t be jumping to Qubes for some time. > It uses gVisor sandboxes running in Linux containers to open dangerous documents, instead of virtual machines. And it also adds some features that TrustedPDF doesn’t have: it works with any office documents, not just PDFs; it uses optical character recognition (OCR) to make the safe PDF have a searchable text layer; and it compresses the final safe PDF. Previously (announcement and details of gVisor sandboxing etc): Safe Ride into the Dangerzone: Reducing Attack Surface with GVisor https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41630076

Sounds like https://dangerzone.rocks/

(Hi, disclaimer: I'm one of the current dangerzone maintainers) You are correct: that's basically what Dangerzone is doing! The challenges for us are to have a sandbox that keeps being secure and make it possible for non-tech folks (e.g. journalists) to run this in their machines easily. About the sandbox: - Making sure that it's still updated requires some work: that's testing new container images, and having a way to distribute them securely to the host machines ; - In addition to running in a container, we reduce the attack surface by using gVisor¹ ; - We pass a few flags to the Docker/Podman invocation, effectively blocking network access and reducing the authorized system calls ; Also, in our case the sandbox doesn't mount the host filesystem in any way, and we're streaming back pixels, that will be then written to a PDF by the host (we're also currently considering adding the option to write back images instead). The other part of the work is to make that easily accessible to non-tech folks. That means packaging Podman on macOS/Windows, and providing an interface that works on all major OSes. ¹ https://dangerzone.rocks/news/2024-09-23-gvisor/