How to sign PDF with a x.509 signature/certificate

Question

tl;dr: I'm looking for a CLI tool that can be fed with a x.509 file and an input PDF and out comes a signed PDF. Best scenario for NodeJS

Hi there. I'm getting a little bit frustrated. I'm looking for a tool which can sign PDF files using the command line. I do use an online service called handy-signatur.at (A service from www.a-trust.at) that generates a x.509 certificate.

I found a page that mentions several tools but it seems that all of them are out of date.

I tried PortableSigner in particular, but that needs Java 6 and I couldn't get it to work on Ubuntu (Server and Desktop edition) 17.04.

/edit: I can't get PortableSigner to work because Java 6 and 7 is no longer available and probably not even safe to use.

Is there any commandline tool out there to sign PDFs?

Thank you guys so much!

Answer 1

Seems PortableSigner do the work.

If you are worried about Java 7 support. Try it with Java 8, probably the digital signature functions still work because nothing important has changed between 7&8

Alternatively, implementing a signature program with Java using libraries like PDFBox or itext is relatively easy. Here you have a full example with pdfbox. Note that it has a main

https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/pdfbox/trunk/examples/src/main/java/org/apache/pdfbox/examples/signature/CreateSignature.java

usage:

java org.apache.pdfbox.examples.signature.CreateSignature 
     <pkcs12_keystore> <password> <pdf_to_sign>