Chromium Release 94+ (Chrome, Edge) Security Feature Introduces Incompatibility with Ephesoft Web Scanner Service

Applies to: Chromium version 94+ based browsers and Transact releases before 2022.1.00.

Update 8/12/2022: Permanent fix is available by a hotfix or by upgrading to 2022.1 or newer. Hotfixes for older Transact versions will begin releasing 8/12/2022 onward. Please visit the Hotfix Library page on the Customer Support Portal to download available hotfixes.

Update 7/29/2022: Beginning with release 107 for Chrome (scheduled for October 2022) and all variants of chromium-based web browsers, the workaround available below will no longer be provided by Google. Google will be rolling out the Chrome will send Private Network Access preflights for subresources security feature.

We encourage all clients using Web Scanner ingestion to update to Transact 2022.1.00 as a permanent fix. It is available for download now from our Customer Support Portal.

Clients unable to upgrade can expect a new Web Scanner client to be delivered for Transact releases in accordance with our Product Support Policy. If you are a Transact Cloud customer, we will notify you as soon as new Web Scanner client components have been deployed to your Transact instance. We’ll share the required upgrade steps to patch your Web Scanner workstations. For early hotfix availability notification, please fill out this form.

Issue

The Ephesoft Web Scanner Service may be prevented from communicating with the Transact server after the latest Chromium browser security update. This will impact document ingestion. Users may see the following warning as a result of this browser update and will not be allowed to continue:

Ephesoft Transact Scanner Service is not running. Please run the service or install the Ephesoft Transact Scanner Service.

This affects users utilizing the Transact Web Scanner for batch instance ingestion with the Chromium browser version 94 and above (Chrome or Edge) in non-secure environments (HTTP). This issue applies to all Transact releases.

Root Cause

This issue occurs due to the recent update to Chromium version 94 based-browsers such as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge.

Workaround

To resolve this issue in the Chrome browser, perform the following steps.

  1. Go to the address bar and enter Chrome://flags
  2. Press Enter to load the flags menu.
  3. Change the value of the Block insecure private network requests flag to Disabled.
  4. Click Relaunch, then refresh and retry web scanner initiation.

To resolve this issue in the Edge browser, perform the following steps.

  1. Go to the address bar and enter Edge://flags
  2. Press Enter to load the flags menu.
  3. Change the value of the Block insecure private network requests flag to Disabled.
  4. Click Restart, then refresh and retry web scanner initiation.

Alternatively, Firefox or previous browser versions (chromium 93 or earlier) can be used to workaround the issue.