Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#11

Post by AdmVonSchneider » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 1:40 PM UTC

Back at zynamics, we used to sell PDF Dissector:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110902114238/http://www.zynami...

We never got around to open sourcing it, so I'm happy to see that there is work being done in this space.

Congrats to seekbytes for releasing this!

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#12

Post by nicolodev » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 1:47 PM UTC

AdmVonSchneider wrote: post #11

Back at zynamics, we used to sell PDF Dissector: https://web.archive.org/web/20110902114238/http://www.zynami... We never got around to open sourcing it, so I'm happy to see that there is work being done in this space. Congrats to seekbytes for releasing this!

:D Well, I'm sure that half of reverse engineering community needs to thank you, and Zynamics for the important contribution for tools of static analysis. I just take the occasion to thank you for being an inspiration with such awesome tools like in BinNavi, BinDiff, and ultimately PDF dissector. When I was reading that it got discontinued, I just had that idea and started to reason about something focused on analysis, and applying some approaches we've already seen for the binary analysis tools.

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#13

Post by jeffreportmill1 » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 1:59 PM UTC

Great work! I'm sorry to be another jerk posting a link to something similar, but here is my solution, running in the browser (just drag and drop your PDF in):

https://reportmill.com/snaptea/PDFViewer/

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#14

Post by geekodour » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 2:02 PM UTC

what's a good tool to check if a pdf is not tampered with eg. as a tool to check before loading a pdf from a public bucket to your backend application?

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#15

Post by nicolodev » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 2:03 PM UTC

jeffreportmill1 wrote: post #13

Great work! I'm sorry to be another jerk posting a link to something similar, but here is my solution, running in the browser (just drag and drop your PDF in): https://reportmill.com/snaptea/PDFViewer/

Nice! My tool should be runnable in the browser thanks to wasm compatibility with Rust + egui :) Btw I've just tried it, and it's a little bit buggy in Safari with a 504kb PDF (lots of objects though). Apart from that, is there a way to export the raw stream? Is there any reason of do you print all the raw streams as a text?

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#16

Post by jerknextdoor » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:03 PM UTC

I was curious to try this out as it might actually solve a minor problem of mine right now, but it crashed as soon as I tried to open a PDF.

Installed from git using cargo 1.80.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 on an AMD Framework laptop if that's of any help.

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#17

Post by nicolodev » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 3:06 PM UTC

jerknextdoor wrote: post #16

I was curious to try this out as it might actually solve a minor problem of mine right now, but it crashed as soon as I tried to open a PDF. Installed from git using cargo 1.80.1 on Ubuntu 22.04 on an AMD Framework laptop if that's of any help.

argh, that's too bad, feel free to open an issue, what's happening in the console? It's panicking, isn't it? Feel free to contact me via email if you prefer

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#18

Post by ZoomZoomZoom » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 4:00 PM UTC

I recently wanted to edit out a huge background image repeating on almost every page of a PDF and found out there's no obvious way to do it.

Would appreciate any tool suggestions!

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#19

Post by dr_kiszonka » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 4:26 PM UTC

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #18

I recently wanted to edit out a huge background image repeating on almost every page of a PDF and found out there's no obvious way to do it. Would appreciate any tool suggestions!

You could try one of Adobe's PDF APIs or script their software locally.

Re: Show HN: IPA, a GUI for exploring inner details of PDFs

#20

Post by darknavi » Wed, Aug 28, 2024, 4:37 PM UTC

ZoomZoomZoom wrote: post #18

I recently wanted to edit out a huge background image repeating on almost every page of a PDF and found out there's no obvious way to do it. Would appreciate any tool suggestions!

If you're OK doing it manually (not scripted), Inkscape can do this.