Chrome Native Messaging with Group Policies FIX

[ajoubert (Alexander Joubert)]

Hello UiPath people

We recently had some issues getting the Chrome and Edge extensions running properly due to our Group Policies blocking them. The issue was actually not with the extensions themselves but with the Chrome Native Messaging Service exe that needs to be running in the background. This was being blocked by AppLocker but the errors where not clear and there didn’t seem to be any documentation about how to properly fix this.

This is the only error that we where getting and though it is technically correct it didn’t provide us with any real solutions (more details here would be great UiPath).

Eventually we were able to track down the culprit as AppLocker was blocking all unknown EXE files (which totally makes sense) and it was blocking ChromeNativeMessaging.exe which is needed for this all to work.

There are pleanty of topics online and even YouTube videso talking about this and stating that this needs to be running for thigns to work but none of them went into any detail about where the actual file is. It seems obvious now that I found it but it was quite the slog to figure out at the time.

Here is an example of Task Manager running the ChromeNativeMessaging.exe process once it is properly running:

We found the file under C:\ProgramFiles\UiPath\Studio\UiPath\BrowserExtession as seem here:

Once we found it our team was able to whitelist and this resolved our extension issue but there was a second EXE file that needed to be whitelisted as well for the automation popups to work properly… error is shown below:

We found this exe easily enough by following the error path to C:\Users\(userrname)\.nuget\packages\uipath.system.activities.22.10.3\build\net461\WorkerProcess.exe

After both of these where whitelisted everything seems to be working properly. I hope this post helps anyone in a similar position and that UiPath can document this more thoroughly for folks in heavily managed Group Policy environments such as government etc.

Thank you,
Alexander J

[jeevith (Jeevith Hegde, Ph.D.)]

Hi @ajoubert,

Welcome to the community!

Thank you for sharing your fix here. This will surely help many teams.