whitelist

A blacklist usually refers to a list of email or IP addresses known to send spam emails or some other type of unsolicited messages. Such lists are currently used by mail servers for filtering incoming emails and blocking the ones listed, in order to improve mail security and integrity. The blacklist is also the opposite of what is called a whitelist.

Say you have a nasty application on your Apache webserver that has been installed by some people from the marketing department and you can neither remove nor patch it. Maybe it is a time problem, a lack of know-how, a lack of source-code, or possibly even political reasons. Consequently you need to protect it without touching it. There is ModSecurity, but they say this is only for experts. A straightforward alternative is Remo, a graphical rule editor for ModSecurity that comes with a whitelist approach. It has all you need to lock down the application.