Solving company firewalls and SSL troubles 🚀

For the past three weeks, we have been working hard on finding a solution to easily use Python and open-source tools inside corporate networks that follow the pattern of man-in-the-middle or Transparent HTTPS firewalls.

Without going into the details, this is what has been causing the different SSL error cases. We've seen many companies switching or updating to this model as providers like PaloAlto, Sophos, Zscaler, etc. are all marketing this functionality.

The first version of a guiding document can be found in our docs-site. All of our templates are now also updated to the required levels.

👉 The call to action is: Update your dependencies This requires Python 3.10 and the specific version of pip that you can find in the docs and templates.

These updates enable Python implementations to use the OS-specific certificate store to validate HTTPS traffic. This should mean that the certificates provided by the firewall are valid, as it is standard practice to have IT update the certificate stores.

We've also worked hard to reduce the number of web domains you need to whitelist in your firewalls. For those using Selenium, the web drivers for the browsers now come via the robocorp.com domain, which cuts some six domains off the list.

In Setup Utility and RCC related to this we have added TLS checks to the diagnostics to help out in finding these cases.

We are not yet done, as there are still open-source tools and cases that do not enable us to fix all cases, but this is a big step forward.