Whitelisting--which is being presented as the panacea for PCI compliance--is being welcomed with positive responses from the retail community to help with the burden of managing and protecting point-of-sale systems. Whitelisting has become the answer to the escalating malware situation. Providing the ability to allow only authorized applications to run while denying all others eliminates the need to keep up with the proliferation of malware objects.

This paper will examine the truths about application whitelisting and illustrate that not all approaches provide the same benefits. Understanding these differences will help to distinguish which solutions are best-suited to weather the storm of sustaining security and PCI compliance for enterprise environments.