The original title is: "Adobe Producer Spoofing: A PDF Metadata Forgery Case Study"

Short summary

A detailed case study on producer identity forgery in PDFs, where forgers overwrite the Producer metadata string to claim Adobe authorship and bypass naive fraud checks. The article explains why metadata-only verification fails and advocates a structural approach that checks whether the file's internal structure matches genuine Adobe output patterns. It introduces the public marker HTPBE_PRODUCER_IDENTITY_FORGED for detecting such contradictions.

• •Forgers overwrite PDF Producer metadata to claim Adobe authorship, bypassing naive fraud checks
• •Metadata-only verification checks the one field attackers fully control
• •Structural fingerprinting catches contradictions that self-reported metadata strings cannot

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