The PDF specification is critical to the PDF technology ecosystem and its stakeholders. “The spec” is the “law” that defines what a valid PDF file must be. While PDF does not have a reference implementation, the common practice of relying on reverse-engineering the work of others, or examining PDFs “from the wild” tends to lead … Read more
The PDF Association’s CTO, Peter Wyatt, will walk through the many and various free technical resources provided by the PDF Association. Understand: the roadmap and brief history across all PDF technical resources; how the technical resources are organized and arranged at https://pdfa.org/resources and in GitHub https://github.com/pdf-association; where to locate specific kinds of technical information; why … Read more
This talk will present the Arlington PDF Model as the first open access, vendor-neutral, comprehensive, specification-derived machine-readable definition of all formally defined PDF objects and their intra- and inter-object relationships. This represents the bulk of the latest 1,000-page ISO PDF 2.0 specification in a machine-readable text-based definition of the entire PDF DOM. It establishes a … Read more
This talk will present industry-relevant outcomes from the DARPA-funded “SafeDocs” research program, as well as reviewing future directions. This research is aimed at reducing the attack surface of parsing software, and identifying and removing inherent weaknesses in the file formats, including PDF and its many nested formats. Outcomes include: the “Issue Tracker” corpus comprising 1000s … Read more
Since the original publication of PDF 2.0 as the almost 1000-page ISO 32000-2:2017 specification, ISO subject matter experts have been working on a “dated revision” update to ISO 32000-2. This new and improved publication will soon replace the 2017 edition of PDF 2.0 (and it is still called PDF 2.0), as it includes many corrections, … Read more
The PDF Association serves as an industry partner in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-funded Safe Documents (SafeDocs) program, with Peter Wyatt working on behalf of the PDF industry as the PDF Principal Investigator. The underlying SafeDocs’ approach is that of ‘language-theoretic security’ (LangSec) which applies numerous formal approaches to create cyber-security-aware data definitions … Read more