pyHanko 0.2.0

Tools for stamping and signing PDF files

The lack of open-source CLI tooling to handle digitally signing and stamping PDF files was bothering me, so I went ahead and rolled my own.

Note: The working title of this project (and former name of the repository on GitHub) was pdf-stamp, which might still linger in some references.

Note: This project is currently in alpha, and not yet production-ready.

Installing

PyHanko is hosted on PyPI, and can be installed using pip:

   pip install pyHanko

Overview

The code in this repository functions both as a library and as a command-line tool. It's nowhere near complete, but here is a short overview of the features. Note that not all of these are necessarily exposed through the CLI.

• Stamping
  • Simple text-based stamps
  • QR stamps
  • Font can be monospaced, or embedded from an OTF font (experimental)
• Document preparation
  • Add empty signature fields to existing PDFs
  • Add seed values to signature fields, with or without constraints
• Signing
  • Signatures can be invisible, or with an appearance based on the stamping tools
  • LTV-enabled signatures are supported
    • PAdES baseline profiles B-B, B-T, B-LT and B-LTA are all supported.
    • Adobe-style revocation info embedding is also supported.
  • RFC 3161 timestamp server support
  • Support for multiple signatures (all modifications are executed using incremental updates to preserve cryptographic integrity)
  • PKCS11 support
    • Extra convenience wrapper for Belgian eID cards
• Signature validation
  • Cryptographic integrity check
  • Authentication through X.509 chain of trust validation
  • LTV validation
  • Difference analysis on files with multiple signatures and/or incremental updates made after signing (experimental)
  • Signature seed value constraint validation
• Encryption
  • Only legacy RC4-based encryption is currently supported (based on what PyPDF2 offers). This should not be used for new files, since it has been broken for quite some time.
  • Modern AES-based PDF encryption is on the roadmap.
• CLI & configuration
  • YAML-based configuration (optional for most features)
  • CLI based on click
    • Available as pyhanko (when installed) or python -m pyhanko when running from the source directory
    • Built-in help: run pyhanko --help to get started

Some TODOs and known limitations

See the known issues page in the documentation.

Documentation

Documentation is built using Sphinx, and hosted here on ReadTheDocs.

Acknowledgement

This repository includes code from PyPDF2 (with both minor and major modifications); the original license has been included here.

License

MIT License, see LICENSE.