White lists will be on every desktop within the next five years, according to Patrick Morley, CEO of Massachusetts-based Bit9. Morley was in town to address the Dow Jones VentureWire Technology Showcase in Redwood City, Calif., on Tuesday.

The basic idea behind “white listing” is to define a set of software, a set of vendors, and allow only those trusted applications or files from those vendors to run on your machine. If a file or application is not approved, it will not run. This is the opposite of how we’ve blocked malware from our machines in the past.

Patrick Morley, CEO of Bit9

Of the more than 1 million viruses detected by antivirus vendors last year, more than two-thirds were new. Loading 1 million antivirus signatures (or even a percentage of that if generic signatures are used) is a pretty serious undertaking. The idea with white listing is to identify the applications and files we know to be good, which, in theory, should be considerably less than a million.

Sounds like a good idea to me.