Modern businesses rely on numerous software and third-party applications for their daily operations. From the perspective of security, granting wholesale authorization and permissions to all these applications is risky. Therefore, diligent system administrators adopt a practice to safeguard against potential threats and protect sensitive data. This practice is called application whitelisting.1
In this article, we will explore what application whitelisting is, its benefits, and how administrators can implement it.
What is application whitelisting?
Application whitelisting is the approach of restricting the usage of any tools or applications only to those that are already vetted and approved. Organizations adopt this approach by delegating a system administrator or third-party application to manage the list of applications and enforce these restrictions.
Application whitelisting uses the Zero Trust principle, which holds that no resources within an organization may interact with the system without strict authorization. Though sometimes conflated with the principle of least privilege (PoLP), Zero Trust is more comprehensive. PoLP is primarily concerned with access control, but Zero Trust begins with the premise that any action or actor is potentially malicious and, therefore, requires verification.
Blacklisting2 is a less restrictive approach to whitelisting. This approach allows the use of any third-party tools, provided they are not on the blacklist. However, blacklisting doesn’t account for unidentified threats, sometimes resulting in a misleading sense of security. read more here