HIMSS Word of the Day #368: Whitelist
A whitelist, increasingly called an allowlist, is a list of entities approved for authorized access or privileged membership in a particular area of computing. This post explains how whitelists work, how NIST describes application whitelisting for stopping malware and unauthorized software, how a German research network manages allowlists for authentication between organizations, and what a 2025 study found when it restricted AI web retrieval to authoritative neurology sources.