What is Application Whitelisting?
Application WhitelistingApplication whitelisting is a computer administration practice used to define what applications are trusted and allowed to run. This technique is often used hand-in-hand with application orangelisting and blacklisting which targets the unknown, unwanted, or untrusted software.
Application whitelisting allows only trusted software to run on your networkendpoints, which protects your network from malware threats.endpoints from unlicensed, unwanted, and malicious software. Arellia's Application Control Solution allows you to manage applications flexibly in a large, distributed client environment by putting:
- known trusted applications in a whitelist
- potentially trusted applications in an orangelist (also known as a graylist)
- everything else in a blacklist
Static and Dynamic Whitelists
Multiple Whitelists
We recommend creating separate whitelists for all the separate departments within your organization. Why? Because not all departments need the same applications on their whitelist, and multiple whitelists are easier to manage than one master whitelist that includes every trusted application in your environment.
Building an Initial Whitelist
A common approach to building an initial whitelist is to put all of the trusted applications in a whitelist and move everything else automatically to a blacklist, but only our most experienced customers should try this approach because it results in denials of service and angry users.
The standard operating system image(s) can be leveraged to build an initial whitelist. Add to that all packages in the IT delivered software repository, which can also be added to a whitelist. You can add The Application Control Solution allows you to add applications to your whitelist using the following attributes:
- Reference systems
- Managed software
- File ownership
- Digital signature
- Vendor
- Locations
Creating a whitelist that targets applications according to file hashes by filehash is not very manageable because every time an application is updated , the file hash changes, and the application will fall off the whitelist, requiring you you will then have to re-add it to the whitelist policy. The Application Control Solution allows you to target applications for your whitelists according to its digital signature, allowing for a dynamic whitelist–when
We recommend targeting applications on your whitelist according to their digital signature. This results in a dynamic whitelist, because when these applications are updated , the digital signature does not change as often and the application will stay whitelistedremain on the whitelist.Multiple Whitelists
Related Links
As the Whitelist and Orangelist policies both did not have the Continue enforcing policies after enforcing this policy selected, no additional policies will be evaluated once criteria has been met. As such, any applications that don’t meet the Whitelist or Orangelist criteria will be blacklisted when this policy has a larger Policy priority.
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