How to open AWS SOC PDF reports on gnu/linux?

Question

When opening the PDF generated by AWS for SOC-2 compliance in linux, evince is showing this error:

Sadly, there is no instructions for Linux and Adobe is not supported in this system.

Is it possible to see what is inside?

Answer 1

It looks like they used PDF as a ZIP file. So, first step is to show what is inside the PDF with pdfdetach, what can be installed with the poppler-utils package in ubuntu (apt install poppler-utils).

So, if our file is called Service_Organization_Controls_(SOC)_2_Report_-_Current.pdf, you can do:

pdfdetach 'Service_Organization_Controls_(SOC)_2_Report_-_Current.pdf' -list

This will list the internal content, that looks like:

$ pdfdetach 'Service_Organization_Controls_(SOC)_2_Report_-_Current.pdf' -list
2 embedded files
1: Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Report - Current/AWS SOC 2 Report Apr-Sept 2020 - FINAL.pdf
2: Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Report - Current/SOC2 Excel Provided by AWS Apr-Sept 2020.pdf

so we can extract the first document, but pdfdetach doesn't work because the directory doesn't exist, so it is required to create it by hand:

mkdir Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Report - Current
pdfdetach 'Service_Organization_Controls_(SOC)_2_Report_-_Current.pdf' -saveall

and now you can open Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Report - Current/AWS SOC 2 Report Apr-Sept 2020 - FINAL.pdf as usual, but Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Report - Current/SOC2 Excel Provided by AWS Apr-Sept 2020.pdf is just a container again:

pdfdetach "Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Report - Current/SOC2 Excel Provided by AWS Apr-Sept 2020.pdf" -list 

so you need to extract the real excel file, but this time it doesn't have spaces:

pdfdetach "Service Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Report - Current/SOC2 Excel Provided by AWS Apr-Sept 2020.pdf" -saveall

And you will get the excel file as well.