Definition:
Traditional antivirus works via a blacklist approach, identifying known bad files and responding accordingly. The reverse of that approach, whitelisting, identifies all known good items. Companies can use whitelisting to allow only known good applications to run on a system, though some view the practice as too expensive and time consuming to be practical. In other cases, whitelists can be used as an exception list, whereby signature-based scanners only examine items not currently included on an accompanying whitelist.
