A very important consideration for designing
interactive PDF forms is ensuring that your forms and the data you
gather is secure. The following functions and features in Designer
provide security options for your forms:
PDF Security settings
Let you define the access capabilities users have to the PDF
forms. In the Form Properties dialog box, you can specify a password
that the users must enter to open and fill the form. You can also
restrict various levels of access to the form. For example, you
may want to allow users to fill fields and signatures but not add
comments or pages to the form.
Digital signatures
Let you authenticate a signing party and ensure that a form is
not altered after it is signed. To add a digital signature field
to a form design, you can use a signature field or a data signature
associated with a submit button. Use a signature field to protect
the appearance of the form objects and the values they hold. Use
a data signature to protect the integrity of the form data.
Password fields
Let you control access to a form. You can set character masking as
an option to the field so that the data is not displayed on the
screen. You can define whether the password is optional, recommended,
or required, and you can set up messages to prompt users appropriately.
All user input may be validated through scripting. You can also
bind password fields to data sources.
Secure WSDL data connections
Let you use HTTP/HTTPS and message-level (SOAP) client authentication
to access WSDL documents and to connect to secure web services by
using a security token (embedded in the SOAP message header).
XML Encryption
Lets you apply XML encryption to form content. You can apply encryption
options like specifying the content to encrypt, the encryption algorithm
to use, the public encryption certificates to encrypt for, as well
as the key usage criteria to use when filtering for public encryption
certificates.
