Malicious PDF Generator ☠️

Generate 67 malicious PDF test files for testing phone-home callbacks, SSRF, XSS, XXE, NTLM credential theft, and data exfiltration in PDF viewers, converters, and web applications. Can be used with Burp Collaborator or Interact.sh

Used for penetration testing, bug bounty hunting, and/or red-teaming etc. I created this tool because I needed a tool to generate a bunch of PDF files with various links. Educational and professional purposes only.

Usage

pip install -r requirements.txt
python3 malicious-pdf.py burp-collaborator-url

Output will be written to the output/ directory as: test1.pdf, test2.pdf, test3.pdf etc.

Options

--output-dir DIR    Directory to save generated PDF files (default: output/)
--no-credit         Do not embed credit/attribution metadata in generated PDFs
--obfuscate LEVEL   Obfuscation level (0-3):
                      0 = None (default)
                      1 = PDF name hex encoding + string octal/hex encoding
                      2 = Level 1 + JS bracket notation + javascript: URI case/whitespace obfuscation
                      3 = Level 2 + FlateDecode stream compression

Example with obfuscation:

python3 malicious-pdf.py https://your-interact-sh-url --obfuscate 2

Maximum obfuscation (Level 4 wraps JS payloads in a base64 decoder stub so the original API calls never appear as literal substrings):

python3 malicious-pdf.py https://your-interact-sh-url --obfuscate 4

Purpose

• Test web pages/services accepting PDF files
• Test security products
• Test PDF readers
• Test PDF converters
• Test server-side PDF processing libraries (PDFBox, iText, etc.)
• Test PDF static analysis tools — staged JS payloads (form-field /V, base64 decoder) defeat naïve /JS regex scanners
• Bug bounty hunting — useful for finding SSRF, XXE, blind callbacks, and NTLM leaks in file upload endpoints, PDF-to-image converters, and document processing pipelines on programs that accept PDF input

Credits

• Insecure features in PDFs
• Burp Suite UploadScanner
• Bad-Pdf
• A Curious Exploration of Malicious PDF Documents
• "Portable Document Flaws 101" talk at Black Hat USA 2020
• Adobe Reader - PDF callback via XSLT stylesheet in XFA
• Foxit PDF Reader PoC, DoHyun Lee
• Eicar test file by Stas Yakobov
• Multiple PDF Vulnerabilities - FormCalc & XXE
• PDF - Mess with the web - FormCalc header injection
• Adobe Reader PDF - Client Side Request Injection
• ImageMagick - Shell injection via PDF password
• Portable Data Exfiltration - PortSwigger Research
• CVE-2024-4367 - Arbitrary JS execution in PDF.js
• PDF File Formats Security - Philippe Lagadec
• CVE-2016-2175 - Apache PDFBox XXE
• CVE-2017-9096 - iText XXE
• CVE-2020-29075 - Acrobat Reader silent DNS tracking
• CVE-2022-28244 - Acrobat Reader CSP bypass
• CVE-2018-5158 - Firefox PDF.js PostScript calculator injection
• CVE-2018-20065 - PDFium URI action without user gesture
• ExpMon - Sophisticated Adobe Reader 0-day analysis (April 2026) — inspiration for test33_13/14/15 and obfuscation Level 4

In Media

• Brisk Infosec
• Daily REDTeam
• Malicious PDF File | Red Team | Penetration Testing
• John Hammond - Can a PDF File be Malware?
• Black Hat Ethical Hacking
• 0x1 Pentesting Collection
• Security Toolkit / WADComs
• unsafe.sh
• Cristi Zot on LinkedIn
• Siva R. on LinkedIn

Complete Test Matrix

<details> <summary>Click to expand all 70 test cases</summary>

| Test File | Function | CVE/Reference | Attack Vector | Method | Impact | |-----------|----------|---------------|---------------|---------|---------| | test1.pdf | create_malpdf() | CVE-2018-4993 | External file access | /GoToE action with UNC path | Network callback via file system | | test1_1.pdf | create_malpdf() | CVE-2018-4993 | External file access | /GoToE action with HTTPS URL | Network callback via HTTPS | | test2.pdf | create_malpdf2() | XFA form submission | Form data exfiltration | XDP form with submit event | Automatic form submission | | test3.pdf | create_malpdf3() | JavaScript injection | Code execution | /OpenAction with app.openDoc() | External document loading | | test4.pdf | create_malpdf4() | CVE-2019-7089 | XSLT injection | XFA with external XSLT stylesheet | UNC path callback | | test5.pdf | create_malpdf5() | PDF101 research | URI action | /URI action type | DNS prefetching/HTTP request | | test6.pdf | create_malpdf6() | PDF101 research | Launch action | /Launch with external URL | External resource execution | | test7.pdf | create_malpdf7() | PDF101 research | Remote PDF | /GoToR action | Remote PDF loading | | test8.pdf | create_malpdf8() | PDF101 research | Form submission | /SubmitForm with HTML flags | Form data submission | | test9.pdf | create_malpdf9() | PDF101 research | Data import | /ImportData action | External data import | | test10.pdf | create_malpdf10() | CVE-2017-10951 | JavaScript execution | Foxit this.getURL() callback | Network callback via Foxit Reader | | test11.pdf | create_malpdf11() | EICAR test | AV detection | Embedded EICAR string | Anti-virus testing | | test12.pdf | create_malpdf12() | CVE-2014-8453 | FormCalc data exfiltration | XFA FormCalc Post() function | Same-origin data exfiltration with cookies | | test13.pdf | create_malpdf13() | Request injection | CRLF header injection | XFA submit textEncoding CRLF | HTTP header manipulation | | test14.svg | create_malpdf14() | ImageMagick shell injection | Shell injection via SVG/MSL | SVG-MSL polyglot authenticate attribute | Remote code execution via ImageMagick | | test15.pdf | create_malpdf15() | PDF specification | FormCalc header injection | XFA FormCalc Post() with custom headers | Arbitrary HTTP header injection | | test16.pdf | create_malpdf16() | PDF specification | JavaScript via GotoE | /GoToE with javascript: URI | Browser XSS when PDF embedded via <embed>/<object> | | test17.pdf | create_malpdf17() | CVE-2014-8452 | XXE injection | XMLData.parse() external entity | XML external entity resolution | | test18.pdf | create_malpdf18() | PortSwigger research | Annotation URI injection | Unescaped parens inject JS action via duplicate /A key | XSS via PDF-Lib/jsPDF output | | test19.pdf | create_malpdf19() | PortSwigger research | PV auto-execution | /AA /PV Screen annotation fires JS on page visible | Automatic code execution (Acrobat) | | test20.pdf | create_malpdf20() | PortSwigger research | PC close trigger | /AA /PC annotation fires JS on page close | Code execution on close (Acrobat) | | test21.pdf | create_malpdf21() | PortSwigger research | SubmitForm SubmitPDF | /SubmitForm with Flags 256 sends entire PDF | Full PDF content exfiltration | | test22.pdf | create_malpdf22() | PortSwigger research | JS submitForm() | this.submitForm() with cSubmitAs: "PDF" | PDF content submission (Acrobat) | | test23.pdf | create_malpdf23() | PortSwigger research | Widget button injection | Invisible /Btn widget covering page, JS on click | Code execution (Chrome/PDFium) | | test24.pdf | create_malpdf24() | PortSwigger research | Text field SSRF | Widget /Tx field with submitForm() POST | Blind SSRF via form data | | test25.pdf | create_malpdf25() | PortSwigger research | Content extraction | getPageNthWord() reads all text and exfiltrates | Rendered t