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

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

#31

Post by nicolodev »

richardw wrote: post #30
svat wrote: post #3

This is cool! Here are some other similar(?) tools, for seeing the inner contents of a PDF file (the raw objects etc), but I haven't compared them to this tool here: - https://pdf.hyzyla.dev/ - https://github.com/itext/i7j-rups (java -jar ~/Downloads/itext-rups-7.2.5.jar) - https://github.com/desgeeko/pdfsyntax (python3 -m pdfsyntax inspect foo.pdf > output.html) - https://github.com/trailofbits/polyfile (polyfile --…

Recommend just letting people have their one day in the sun. We’ve become less the site of builders as the red team for testing your launch.

yeah I agree, and while everyone is suggesting tools which are really good but I designed mine to get rid of the flags and CLI interface. Good for tech people that keeps remembering flags, I'm not :(

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

#33

Post by verdverm »

AlanYx wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good tool that allows both programmatic inspection and modification of PDF primitives. For example, let's say someone wants to iterate through every embedded image in a PDF and apply some form of signal processing to the images in-place, then re-save the PDF?

I've been using several Python libraries for working with PDFs. At least one of them allows you to walk the AST. (will look up in a bit and edit this comment)

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

#34

Post by verdverm »

remram wrote: post #32
geekodour wrote: post #14

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?

How could a PDF be tampered with in your own bucket?

Sounds like they amay be accepting user PDFs, saving them to a bucket, and then doing processing after.

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

#35

Post by mdaniel »

nicolodev wrote: post #17
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

heh, parsing PDF files from the wild is practically a community driven fuzzer

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

#36

Post by mdaniel »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #25

This looks nice, and I didn't know about eGUI which looks like it runs on the web. Very interesting. https://www.egui.rs/

That demo page told me everything I needed to know about not using that framework. There's no right-click to copy the text, and there's similarly no context menu to open links in a new tab, or copy their URL

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

#37

Post by remram »

verdverm wrote: post #34
remram wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could a PDF be tampered with in your own bucket?

Sounds like they amay be accepting user PDFs, saving them to a bucket, and then doing processing after.

They trust their AWS EC2 instance doing the processing but not their AWS S3 bucket doing the storing? I don't really understand the threat model here.

And what's "public bucket"?

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

#38

Post by analog31 »

verdverm wrote: post #33
AlanYx wrote: post #4

Does anyone have any recommendations for a good tool that allows both programmatic inspection and modification of PDF primitives. For example, let's say someone wants to iterate through every embedded image in a PDF and apply some form of signal processing to the images in-place, then re-save the PDF?

I've been using several Python libraries for working with PDFs. At least one of them allows you to walk the AST. (will look up in a bit and edit this comment)

I've been using pypdf for working with PDFs in Python. My uses are pretty humble. I create Jupyter notebooks for managing sheet music that I receive in PDF format, allowing me to do things like break up a book of tunes into individual files, and so forth. This in turns makes it easier to pull up individual tunes on my tablet during a performance. But it looks like you can treat the PDF as a tree structure. I've used that feature for writing some recursive functions.

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

#39

Post by sexy_seedbox »

mdaniel wrote: post #36
giancarlostoro wrote: post #25

This looks nice, and I didn't know about eGUI which looks like it runs on the web. Very interesting. https://www.egui.rs/

That demo page told me everything I needed to know about not using that framework. There's no right-click to copy the text, and there's similarly no context menu to open links in a new tab, or copy their URL

And just like that, we're back to the old days of Macromedia Flash where you have to write your own context menu and specify which texts are selectable.

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

#40

Post by geekodour »

remram wrote: post #32
geekodour wrote: post #14

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?

How could a PDF be tampered with in your own bucket?

apologies my bad. I mean someone uploading a malicious pdf as user input. I am talking beyond calmav and flietype checking, to check if its a valid pdf.
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