pasUNITY has always strived to provide the most secure experience for the widest range of customers. 

We monitor traffic to our pasPortal and other web-based applications to see what types and versions of browsers and operating systems our customers are using.  This information is useful to us because it tells us when our customers adopt and/or deprecate operating systems and browsers.  This in turn lets us know when we can start developing enhancements to pasPortal that take advantage of new browser features and when we can stop supporting legacy browsers.

The official policy for browser support at pasUNITY has always been that we support the latest version of popular HTML5 browsers that are under support and development (such as the latest versions Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome).  We know that some organizations must remain compatible with legacy in-house systems and as such still have Internet Explorer deployed in their enterprise.  Thankfully, most of our enterprise customers have also decided to roll out either the Microsoft Edge or Google Chrome browsers alongside Internet Explorer. pasUNITY encourages all of users still using Internet Explorer to switch to one of the aforementioned browsers as soon as possible.

There does come a time, however, when continuing to support old browsers begins to present a security risk and that is the ultimate criteria for when we discontinue support for legacy browsers.  Due to vulnerabilities in the SSL 3.0 protocol and RC4 ciphers we disabled them a few years ago and as a result many legacy browsers became incompatible entirely.  Recently we disabled the 3DES cipher, MD5 hash, and Diffie-Hellman key exchange effectively terminating compatibility for Internet Explorer 8 and many other browsers.  We will never hesitate to cut off support for any old browser if supporting it puts our infrastructure at risk.

There also comes a time when we break compatibility with legacy browsers just to allow us to build a better product.  We have already begun upgrading our applications to take advantage of modern HTML5 browser capabilities and those applications will no longer support these legacy browsers and instead will require modern HTML5 browsers.  The result will be a more responsive experience with a smaller footprint.  We had held off on this decision for quite a while in order to continue supporting Internet Explorer and give organizations time to transition.  We are no longer testing or supporting our pasPortal application with these legacy browsers. 

The image below shows the result of the latest security scan performed against our pasPortal infrastructure.  We are quite proud to carry an A rating and still be able to support nearly every browser made in the last eight years.


You can run this scan for yourself @ anytime by clicking here.  You might even want to run this scan against some of your favorite sites (or even your corporate sites) - you might be surprised at just how safe (or unsafe) some of them are.

We hope you find this article informative and welcome your feedback via the pasPortal web application.  Watch this blog for more information and timing on future infrastructure changes.