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Level 2

Hi,

I am trying to encrypt a pdf with the receipient's public key and have him decrypt it with his private key. As far as I understood, it is the same procedure as signing and verifying, but with the public and private key exchanged. I am new to this, so please correct me if I am wrong here.

My  problem is, that the Adobe Reader 9 on my windows XP machine would not find any certificate to decrypt the document. I encrypted it with the standard windows certificate each user has and with an imported one, both were not found. When I got to the security preferences in the Reader, I can see both the certificates. When I use my private key to sign the document I cannot open it with the Reader either.

1. How can I make the Reader recognise my certificates?

2. Can I use the Windows PKI with the default windows certificate or do I have to get some fancy PKI product for that?

3. Does it make a difference for the reader if I sign the pdf or encrypt it for one single user?

What I do in detail:

I take a dynamic form, remove the reader extension (because I would get an Exception during encrypting otherwise) and encrypt it using the Java API for the Adobe Livecycle ES, like it is shown here. Before that I created a PKCS#12 certificate using openssl on my Ubuntu 10.10 machine like it is shown here. I imported that into the windows certificate store like shown here. Then I try to open the encrypted document on the windows machine and get the message that a digital ID was used to encrypt this document and there was no digital ID found to decrypt it.

After that I try plan B. I export the windows certificate of my user and use it to encrypt the pdf document. I export it with private key or without, it does not make any difference. I open the PDF file on the windows machine again and get the same message as above. I assumed that he should at least know his own certificate, but he does not.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Cheers,

Arne