Social whitelisting is, in a lot of ways, contrary to security or IT norms. Users are given a great deal of authority to make their own security decisions. Still, users must operate in a secure host environment. Clearly, social whitelisting offers some tradeoffs between administrative ease and security but the exact pros and cons bear discussion.

First, there's the big benefit of Lockdown mode which blocks background and/or unintended executions. Silent exploitation, like drive-by downloads, can be a significant threat to users regardless of their technical-savvy. For this reason, Upvote stresses the importance of user intent because even users with less technical familiarity know when they didn't intend on running any software.

The next benefit is live comparison against binary analysis services. Without running any additional antivirus-type solution, Upvote can ensure that all novel executions get checked against known-malicious sources.

And the last big advantage is that by involving users in the process of evaluating application safety, they can be educated to become better stewards of their technology and data.

One risk of this approach is the lessened control over whitelisted applications. Although this is by-design, Upvote does allow varying degrees of restrictive policies to be implemented within this social whitelisting system. One can proactively blacklisting publishers, certs, and binaries of undesirable applications, raise the whitelisting thresholds, and closely monitor all user whitelisting actions.

The biggest risk, though, is users whitelisting malware. While this is inherent in any system where users are given this sort of power, Upvote reduces the impact of this risk by whitelisting locally by default (exercising the Principle of Least Privilege). This restricted whitelisting policy will slow an attacker who manages to get a foothold on a machine in the fleet. And any increase in latency between code execution and the first pivot within the network can be crucial in an effective response.

Finally, perfect is the enemy of good. Trying to force a default-deny binary whitelisting system on users is a recipe for conflict. Putting admins directly in the path for whitelisting approval is often unscalable and breeds antagonism towards the security staff. Social whitelisting is a huge boon to both user convenience and overall security when deploying lockdown mode.