Unlock a PDF — without uploading it

Password-protected PDFs are a routine annoyance once the protection has served its purpose: a bank statement that arrives encrypted every month, a payslip you need to file, a document you have to open a dozen times and type the password into each time. Removing the password from a file you legitimately hold is a reasonable thing to want.

Doing it on a website is not, and this is the clearest case on the whole site. Using a typical online unlocker means uploading an encrypted document and handing over the password that decrypts it — both, together, to a server you know nothing about. That is the exact pair of secrets the encryption existed to keep apart.

Here the file and the password are both processed in your browser by Ghostscript compiled to WebAssembly. Neither is transmitted anywhere; this site has no backend, and a Content-Security-Policy blocks third-party requests. You can disconnect from the network before typing the password and it will still work.

To be unambiguous: you need the correct password. This tool removes protection from a document you can already open — it does not recover, guess, or bypass an unknown password, and it will not help with a file you do not have the credentials for.

That is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. Tools that claim to break PDF passwords are either running dictionary attacks that only work on weak passwords, or are simply not being honest about what they do. What you get here is the ability to stop retyping a password you already know, on a document that is already yours.

The output is the same document with encryption removed: same pages, same text, same images, opening everywhere without a prompt. Text stays selectable and searchable, since decryption does not re-render anything.

Bear in mind what that implies for how you store it. An unlocked copy of a bank statement is readable by anything with access to your filesystem, backups and cloud sync included, so it is worth keeping the decrypted version somewhere you would be comfortable with the contents living.

If you need to protect it again later — perhaps with a password you actually chose, rather than the one your bank derives from your date of birth — Protect PDF re-encrypts it on your device. Now that the file opens freely, the other tools work on it too: merging, splitting, and compressing all refuse encrypted input.