Software Bill of Materials
Let’s take a peek into why developers should be building a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for the transparency and security of their apps.
Software Bill of Materials
Open up your favorite IDE, jump into your most recent project, and open its respective lockfile (package-lock.json, go.mod, Pipfile.lock, and so on). You’ll likely find hundreds or thousands of open-source packages and libraries, illustrating exactly how widely your application's unseen and unknown parts spread.
A Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) is a similar inventory of all software components, libraries, and dependencies your application relies on, but goes deeper than package names and pinned versions. By aggregating data on open-source licenses and more, an SBOM gives you complete visibility, which you can use to prevent supply chain attacks or identify new vulnerabilities in a dependency two, three, or more layers deep.
is the average cost of data breaches involving third-party dependencies as a primary attack vector.
IBM
contain open-source tools and libraries with at least one active vulnerability.
Synopsys
discovered among popular open-source libraries, with 1 in 8 downloads containing known and avoidable risks.
Sonatype
An example of a Software Bill of Materials and how it works
An SBOM comes in many different output formats and data structures, but is ultimately a database of artifacts, including their package names, versions, sources, licenses, URLs, and more. SBOMs also identify the relationship between two artifacts for transparency into the web of dependencies your application relies on.
While SBOMs aren’t particularly useful to scroll through, they are enormously helpful in the broader vulnerability management of your application. You can feed your apps’ SBOMs into other tools offering dependency scanning, malware detection, or end-of-life (EOL) data to ensure you’re surfacing every possible vulnerability in your application—not just the ones at the surface level.
How does having a Software Bill of Materials help developers?
When troubleshooting outages on the fly, an up-to-date SBOM helps you identify exactly which package is responsible, even if it’s two or three layers deep.
With a full understanding of the components your application requires to operate effectively, you can perform more proactive risk mitigation by identifying possible weak points and prioritizing fixes or migrations to more secure dependencies.
With an SBOM, your development and operational teams have a single source of truth for collaborating on issues or prioritizing proactive solutions to current problems.
SBOMs help identify changes to an open-source dependency’s metadata, which could clue you into a supply chain attack, where new packages have been injected with malware (remember the XZ Utils backdoor?)
Certain industries and regulatory environments require a complete inventory of licensing terms and sourcing inventories—with a well-maintained and complete SBOM, you can ensure compliance and avoid legal issues.
Implementing a Software Bill of Materials: an overview
Generating SBOMs is accessible to most developers in their local working environment—one option is an open-source tool, like Syft, to investigate any container image or local filesystem:
Syft locally using their one-liner, Homebrew, or a binary release.Or with aikido
Best practices for managing your Software Bill of Materials effectively
Create your first SBOMs as early as possible within your project, even if you haven’t fully chosen your application security platforms. The more history you have, the easier to track changes that negatively affect your application.
While CLI tools are easy to install on your local workstation, they ultimately leave you with artifacts you must store and aggregate elsewhere to generate real insights. At the very least, loop SBOM generation into your CI/CD pipeline to ensure you never forget a manual run.
Using an industry-standard format like CycloneDX or SPDX will let you integrate with more security software and share SBOMs with partners or regulators.
Get started creating a Software Bill of Materials for free
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