Making a backup of your Digital ID

You should always make a backup copy of each Digital ID that you create so that if the original file saved in the Acrobat folder (Acrobat 6.0 on the Mac) ever becomes corrupted, you can use the backup to both sign documents and verify other people’s signatures. To make a backup of your Digital ID, click the Export button in the Digital ID File Settings dialog box for your Digital ID. Then in the Data Exchange File - Export Options dialog box, select the Save the Data to a File radio button in the Export Options area. Click the Next button to open the Export Data As dialog box, select the folder in the Save In drop-down list (preferably on another hard drive, if you have more than one drive on your system or are connected to a network), and click the Save button. Acrobat then displays Certificate Security - Alert dialog box, indicating in which folder you’ve successfully backed up your Digital ID file.

Modifying the user settings in a profile

You can modify the user settings in your Digital ID at any time. You might, for instance, want to associate a graphic with your digital signature (especially one that is actually a picture of your handwritten signature). You also might need to change the password for a profile or want to back up the profile file or change the password timeout options.
Before you can change any settings for your profile, you need to take these steps:

1. 1. Open your Digital ID file by choosing Manage Digital IDs➪My Digital ID Files➪Select My Digital ID File. The Select My Digital ID File dialog box opens.
2. Select the filename of your user Digital ID in the Digital ID File dropdown list, enter your password in User Password text box, and click the OK button. Acrobat automatically opens your Digital ID file.
3. Choose Manage Digital IDs➪My Digital ID Files➪My Digital ID File Settings to open your Digital ID File Settings dialog box.

Setting up your digital ID profile

The first step to be able to use Certificate Security for digitally signing PDF documents is to set up your Digital ID. Your Digital ID contains your password, along with basic information about your role. You can set up multiple profiles for yourself if you digitally sign documents in different roles.
To create a new user profile, follow these steps:

1. Choose Advanced➪Manage Digital IDs➪My Digital ID Files➪Select My Digital ID File. The Select My Digital ID dialog box opens.
2. Click the New Digital ID File button. The Create Self-Signed Digital ID dialog box appears, as shown in Figure.
3. Edit the Name, Organization Unit, Organization Name, E-mail Address, and Country/Region text boxes, if necessary (only the Name text box must be filled in), in the Digital ID Details section of the dialog box. Note the profile name that appears in the Name text box is the name that appears in the Signatures palette in Acrobat 6 and is used in the naming of the Self-Signed Digital ID filename. If you select the Enable Unicode Support check box, Acrobat displays additional text boxes for entering Unicode values for extended characters next to the ASCII versions you just entered.
4. Select an RSA algorithm (either 1024-bit or 2048-bit) in the Key Algorithm drop-down list, and then select a purpose for your Digital ID in the Use Digital ID For drop-down list. Note that 2048-bit offers more security, but 1024-bit is more compatible with current encryption technologies. Your choices are Digital Signatures, Data Encryption, or the default Digital Signatures and Data Encryption.
5. Click in the Enter a Password text box and enter a password of six characters or more.
6. Press Tab to jump to the Confirm Password text box and then reenter the password.
7. Click the Create button to open the New Self-Sign Digital ID File dialog box. By default, Acrobat names the new profile file by combining the profile name with the .pfx file extension in the Security folder within the Acrobat 6.0 folder in Windows, and the Acrobat 6.0 folder on the Macintosh. If you wish, edit the filename before clicking the Save button to save the new profile and close the Create Self-Signed Digital ID dialog box.

Signing Off Digital Style

The Certificate Security option in the Security Method drop-down list in the Document Properties dialog box enables you to digitally sign a PDF document or to verify that a digital signature in a PDF document is valid. Certificate Security is what is known in the trade as a signature handler that uses a private/ public key (also known as PPK) system. In this system, each digital signature is associated with a profile that contains both a private key and a public key.
The private key in your profile is a password-protected number that enables you to digitally sign a PDF document. The public key, which is embedded within your digital signature, enables others who review the document in Acrobat to verify that your signature is valid. Because others must have access to your public key in order to verify your signature, Acrobat puts your public key in what’s called a certificate that is shared. The Certificate Security uses what is known as a direct trust system for sharing certificates, because it doesn’t use a third-party agent (like VeriSign) to do this.

Checking a document’s security settings

You can check the security settings in effect for any PDF document you open in Acrobat 6 or Adobe Reader 6 (of course, you can tell immediately if the file requires a user password because you must supply this password before you can open the document in Acrobat or Adobe Reader). To check the security settings in effect, you choose Document➪Security➪Display Restrictions and Security.
When you select this command in Acrobat, the program opens a Document Properties dialog box with the security settings showing, where you can both review and change the settings. When you select this command in Adobe Reader (choose File➪Document Properties and click Security in the list box to display the security settings), the program simply lists all the settings in effect. The security settings in the Document Properties dialog box contain the Security Method drop-down list that shows you the type of security in effect.
This list can contain one of these three options:

• No Security: The document uses no protection at all.
• Password Security: The document uses a user password and/or master password and possibly restricts the type of edits.
• Certificate Security: The document is encrypted so that only trusted associates with digital certification can open and change it.

Beneath the Security Method drop-down list, you find a Document Restrictions Summary area that lists all the security options in effect. To the right of the Security Method drop-down list, you find the Change Settings button that enables you to change the security settings when either the Password Security or the Certificate Security option is selected in the Security Method drop-down list.

Protecting PDF Files

You can password-protect the opening and editing of PDF documents at the time you first distill them (as part of their Security Settings) or at anytime thereafter in Acrobat 6. When you set the security settings, you can choose between two different levels of encryption:

• 40-bit RC4: Used for PDF files created when you set the encryption level to 40-bit RC4 (Acrobat 3.x, 4.x)
• 128-bit RC4: Used when you set the encryption level to 128-bit RC4 (Acrobat 5.x, 6.0)

40-bit RC4 encryption offers a lower level of file security but is compatible with Acrobat 3 and Acrobat 4. 128-bit RC4 offers a higher level of security (it’s a lot harder to hack into) but is compatible only with Acrobat 5 and Acrobat 6. If you’ll be sharing secured PDF documents with coworkers who haven’t yet upgraded to Acrobat 5 or 6, you’ll have to content yourself with the less secure, 40-bit RC4 encryption. However, if you’re dealing with highly sensitive, “for-your-eyes-only” material, you may want to upgrade everybody to Acrobat 6 as soon as possible, so that you can start taking advantage of the
more secure 128-bit RC4 encryption.

How to edit batch sequences?

You can run, edit, or create new batch sequences from the Batch Sequences dialog box (shown in Figure) that you open by choosing Advanced➪ Batch Processing. To run a batch sequence from this dialog box, click its name in the list box and then click the Run Sequence button. To edit an existing batch sequence, click the name of the sequence in the list box and then click the Edit Sequence button to open the Batch Edit Sequence dialog box. From this dialog box, you can change the sequence of commands executed when you run the sequence with the Select Commands button, change which files are processed by the sequence from the Run Commands On drop-down list, and change where processed files are located in the Select Output Location drop-down list. For details on using these options, refer to the series of steps on creating a new batch sequence in the following post (the steps for using these controls are identical for editing and creating batch sequences).