cnet news
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.
Next five years? Seems like it should be sooner.
This makes even more sense as more of our apps reside on the ‘Net. Maybe the only app we’ll be running is a browser with plug-ins.
I think many readers are confusing programs with websites. This item wasn’t about white listing websites. That doesn’t work for 99% of users. It only works for PCs in Banks and such, that need to be restricted to what sites they access. No, this article was about white listing the software (apps) that are allowed to run on users’ PCs. A white list that would probably be optional, not mandatory and absolute. And would have user choices, of levels of protection. So even if it were enacted, in the future. There would be some way to allow some running software that wasn’t on the list, with the user’s specific permission. What the software white list’s primary purpose is, to prevent malware from secretly operating in the background, that has been secretly loaded to the PC from the Web or other sources.
But let’s be real about this. There aren’t going to be a million open source programs, waiting to be on the white list. The few dozen that are created each year shouldn’t have much of problem getting vetted. It’s those million plus viruses and worms that need to be stopped. And I suspect that anyone who is against this, could be a virus-worm-bot master, themselves. Naturally, they’d hate the white listing idea. So if Microsoft doesn’t offer this soon, I’d hope that at least the Linux guys would. And that Apple’s Mac OS would, too.