Alfresco - Some features fail with a secured PDF

[gsteimer]

Certain features will not work with OpenContent / Alfresco when dealing with secured PDFs. This is due to the fact that we use PDF manipulation code that requires Bouncy Castle 1.52, but Alfresco only has Bouncy Castle 1.45.

The above dependency causes the following features to fail on PDFs that contain password encryption:

• [ ] Open Annotate
• [ ] Open Overlay
• [ ] Active Wizard Form / Adobe Form integration
• [ ] Combine PDF
• [ ] Split PDF
• [ ] Action + Burn in Annotations (ex: Send Email, Combine PDF)

You can tell whether or not your PDF has security by going to the file properties in Acrobat and switching to the Security tab:

Workaround The only known workaround to this problem is to do the following:

• remove the following jars from the alfresco webapp:
  • bcmail-jdk15-1.45.jar
  • bcprov-jdk15-1.45.jar
• Add the following jars:
  • bcprov-ext-jdk15on-1.52.jar
  • bcpkix-jdk15on-1.52.jar
  • bcmail-jdk15on-1.52.jar

The danger with this workaround is that the above actions may break other features of alfresco. Since Bouncy Castle is used for encryption, any portions of Alfresco that rely on the old Bouncy Castle version could potentially be affected. At this time, we are unsure where these classes are used in Alfresco. Some potential culprits - Encrypted Content Stores, Records Manager, and Amazon S3 Connector. If a client goes with this workaround, extensive regression testing is recommended.

Fix Options Here are some potential options to fix the issue:

1. Have Alfresco upgrade their version of Bouncy Castle to 1.52.
2. Split out PDF manipulation features to a separate webapp. Something like this:
   • Create a new oc-pdf-manipulation webapp or command line java tool
   • If an OC flag is set, rather than doing the manipulation internally, call out to the other tool to do the manipulation and stream back the PDF contents

[dgrumieaux]

Keywords for search -

bouncycastle HTTP Status 500 - Handler processing failed; nested exception is java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: org/bouncycastle/asn1/ASN1Primitive

[benallenallen]

As of Alfresco 6.1, this is fixed because they include the following: bcmail-jdk15on-1.60.jar bcpkix-jdk15on-1.60.jar bcprov-jdk15on-1.60.jar