PDF Sanitizer

The portable document format (PDF) is undoubtedly the most preferable file format for exchanging documents across organizations. In general, organization firewall allows downloading PDF files but not executable files, by policy to prevent infections. Attackers have identified this change and hence moved on to use document processing file formats to spread malware infections. The contemporary solutions namely antivirus and IDS rely their detection on known signatures and patterns. Hence, they are unable to detect zero-day malware. In this paper, we present a novice approach which basically works on sanitization of PDF file instead of detection and removal of malicious PDF. Our approach neither relies on signature database nor on dynamic analysis. We have used a Contagio Dump malware sample dataset, and our solution sanitizes all malicious PDF samples with zero false positive and zero false negative results.