Case Study: National Information Security Center (NISC) achieves protection of government PDFs from spoofing and cyberattacks with Adobe Acrobat (GPKI electronic signatures)

National Information Security Center (NISC) - Customer Case Study

The National Information Security Center (NISC), part of Japan’s Cabinet Secretariat, faced rising targeted cyberattacks and widespread spoofing of government documents—many of which were published or emailed as unsecured PDFs (about 5.7 million over three years). Training revealed staff sometimes opened suspicious attachments, creating real risk of altered or falsified public documents, so NISC needed a practical, standards-based way to protect and verify official PDFs.

NISC partnered with Adobe to adopt the ISO 32000-1 PDF standard and integrate Japan’s Government Public Key Infrastructure (GPKI) into Adobe Acrobat X and Reader X by adding GPKI root certificates to the Adobe Approved Trust List. This enabled automatic, cross-platform verification of government electronic signatures, helped prevent spoofing, simplified validation without added cost or complexity, reduced malware risks, and established a scalable foundation for wider government and international document exchange.

NISC